Sen. Bob Bennett and other members of the Senate GOP majority leadership sat down with Bush on Thursday morning to steer the nascent Social Security reform effort back on course after leaked White House memos calling for deep benefit cuts caused several Republican lawmakers to shy away from the plan.

"The president made it very clear to us that when he campaigned on this issue he was serious," Bennett said. "This wasn't just an applause line you forget when you get to Washington."

Later in the day, Sen. Orrin Hatch and a dozen other lawmakers from both parties met with Bush to discuss plans for a new law to limit class-action lawsuits, the broad-based civil claims brought against products such as breast implants, Agent Orange defoliant, tobacco and asbestos. Hatch said he's alarmed by the rash of advertisements soliciting users of Vioxx, the popular painkiller that was pulled from the market three months ago after being linked to heart attacks and strokes.

"Many personal injury attorneys have found out they can get rich soliciting people over television and the Internet," said Hatch. "Unfortunately, that's gone way out of bounds."

The national legislative priorities are jockeying with Utah-specific issues for Hatch and Bennett during the 109th Congress, the first session of which opened last week.

The two say their most important priority for Utah this year will be monitoring the Pentagon panel charged with identifying an estimated 25 percent surplus of unneeded military installations around the country.

"It's no secret that we've had to save Hill a number of times and that's my number one priority in the Senate this year, the survival of that air force base," Hatch said of the state's largest employer, located between Ogden and Layton.

While the process is designed to be free of political influence, Bennett said the state's congressional delegation would give Hill and the state's other military facilities "a high level of attention."

Although among the senior members of the Senate - Hatch was first elected in 1976, Bennett in 1992 - neither lawmaker has command of a full committee in this Congress. Hatch was term-limited off the helm of the judiciary panel with no other chairmanships open and Bennett's spot at the top of the Joint Economic Committee rotated to a House member.

"I don't think you have to be a chairman to be effective," said Hatch. "Being one of the most senior senators here, if I feel strongly about something, I am not going to be ignored."

Hatch is the first-ranking Republican on the Judiciary and Finance committees, and picked up a new seat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, a panel he chaired for four years earlier in his career. He also will chair an as-yet-unnamed Judiciary subcommittee that will focus on intellectual property law, allowing him to continue to wage his crusade against computer piracy of digital music files.

Besides being the leading senator on the economic panel, Bennett will keep a seat on the committee that holds the purse strings to federal spending, Appropriations.

He will probably remain chairman of the Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee, although the assignment has not been finalized.

"I anticipate the [fiscal 2006] budget the president will submit will be very close to a freeze, which always creates problems for appropriators because everybody wants a slight increase over last year," said Bennett. "But we need to do what we can to get control over discretionary spending."

Bennett intends to work with Utah Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson to introduce legislation for better monitoring and health safeguards in the event underground nuclear testing is resumed in Nevada, upwind of Utah.

"But this administration has no plans to conduct nuclear tests, never has had and we can reasonably expect they never will have to," said Bennett.

The successful passage of a bipartisan Nevada public lands wilderness bill at the close of the last session of Congress has inspired Bennett to begin work developing a similar Utah bill that would resolve the fate of some areas in the state identified as potential wilderness.

"This Congress will be the opportunity to deal with some land management issues," said Bennett. "If you can do it in Nevada, you ought to be able to do it in Utah."

Hatch said he'll also focus on reviving legislation that failed last year to limit medical malpractice lawsuits. He blames skyrocketing malpractice insurance premiums for the sharp drop in the number of Utah medical students choosing obstetrics/gynecology as their residency field, something "that's a terrible thing for a state that has so many children."

But he breaks with other GOP lawmakers who want to legislate a ceiling on the amount of damages that can be awarded by a jury in malpractice cases.

"There are cases that really deserve high verdicts and I am a little disappointed, frankly, [that] on our side there is such a desire to have an absolute cap on damages," said Hatch. "For the most part, a cap is a wise thing, but there has to be an escape valve for those egregious, highly negligent cases."