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WASHINGTON — With a tough re-election looming Nov. 7, Rep. Heather Wilson has won one of the biggest legislative victories of her career with House passage of her bill to authorize President Bush's once-secret program of spying on international phone calls and e-mail.

But before the 232-191 vote Thursday night, opponents said Wilson, an Albuquerque Republican, was opening the door to invasions of privacy Americans have not seen since the days of President Richard Nixon, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

The bill would make legal the surveillance program that Bush started after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks with the knowledge of a handful of Congressional leaders, Republicans and Democrats.

The legislation took on greater urgency Thursday after U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit gave the government a week to appeal her Aug. 17 decision on the wiretapping program or shut it down.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Bush bypassed, allows the government to eavesdrop on an Americans' calls for 72 hours before the agents must get a warrant from a special FISA court.

Wilson's bill would give a president the authority to launch electronic surveillance of international phone calls and e-mail linked specifically to identified terrorist groups for 90 days after a terrorist attack or if he tells select members of Congress.

It also allows the surveillance to continue indefinitely without a warrant so long as the president certifies every 90 days that the threat still exists.

U.S. residents could not have their phone calls or e-mail intercepted for longer than 60 days without a FISA warrant, unless the president tells Congress the surveillance is necessary for national security.

Wilson said the bill would let government agents move "as fast as the terrorists who want to kill us," without a lot of paperwork or midnight calls to the attorney general when they want to tap numbers.

"Listen now. Protect us now," Wilson said.

Opponents said Wilson was knuckling under to the White House at the expense of civil liberties.

"What the Republican President wants and what the Republican Congress is prepared to give him is the unrestrained authority to spy on anyone without answering to anyone," said Rep. Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat.

One of the few Republicans to oppose Wilson's bill, Rep. Floyd Flake of Arizona, said the measure would return America to the wiretapping laws of the Nixon era.

Flake and Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, proposed a bipartisan substitute that would have allowed seven days of wiretapping before agents had to get a warrant, but the Republican-controlled Rules Committee refused to allow the House to vote on that or any other amendment.

Democrats during the debate repeatedly referred to the measure as the "White House-Wilson Bill," despite Wilson's insistence it was written without the administration's help or support.

While Wilson maintained she was trying to keep above the political implications of the bill, House Majority Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, saw the legislation as an election-year test of whether Democrats would give the President "the tools to actually go fight the terrorists."

Congress is expected to recess today or Saturday for the election season. Wilson's opponent, New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid, has said she supports a surveillance program but through the FISA court.