By Bruce Odessey
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- After more than a year of delays the Senate has passed a miscellaneous tariffs bill, including a provision aimed at protecting Iraqi antiquities.

By unanimous consent March 4, the Senate passed the bill, which consists mostly of more than 300 provisions for tariff suspension on imports of goods not produced domestically and traded in small volumes.

The House of Representatives passed two versions of the bill in 2003, the latest in November. To become law, a final version of the bill must pass the House and Senate and get the signature of the president.

Included in the Senate-passed bill is the Emergency Protection for Iraqi Cultural Antiquities Act, which aims to prohibit temporarily U.S. imports of archaeological, cultural and other rare items from Iraq until that country completes restructuring, Senator Chuck Grassley, Finance Committee chairman, said on the Senate floor.

"The last thing that we in Congress want to do is fail to act to prevent trade in looted Iraqi artifacts here in the United States," Grassley said.

Also in the Senate bill is a provision to give duty-free treatment to hand-knotted and hand-woven carpets, designed especially to help Afghanistan and Pakistan, he said.

Another provision would correct a mistake in the 2002 Trade Act by reducing retroactively to August 2002 the duties on handbags, luggage, flat goods, work gloves and leather apparel from Andean countries.

Senators from both the Democratic and Republican parties had been blocking versions of the miscellaneous tariffs bill since 2002, in the previous session of Congress, over a number of issues. The most recent House version, for example, would require a special country-of-origin label on socks to satisfy complaints from senators in southern textile-producing states.