“When there’s a fire in your kitchen threatening to burn down your home, you don’t want someone stopping the firefighters on the way and demanding they hand out smoke detectors first or lecturing you about the hazards of keeping paint in the basement,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said in a speech on the Senate floor. “You want them to put out the fire before it burns down your home and everything you’ve saved for your whole life.”

Image Representative Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, after speaking with reporters Monday. Credit... Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

Mr. McConnell added: “The same is true of our current economic situation. We know that there is a serious threat to our economy, and we know that we must take action to try and head off a serious blow to Main Street.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, after a meeting with party leaders on Monday evening, said she, too, remained committed to getting a bill to the president as quickly as possible.

But powerful lawmakers in both parties said they would not be rushed into granting Mr. Bush’s request.

“I walked down LaSalle Street on Friday, a great street in Chicago lined with banks and big office buildings,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat. “A lot of people came up and said ‘hi.’ But a lot of them came up and said: ‘Are you really going to do this? $700 billion bailing out the banks? And I said: ‘I don’t know. At the end of the day, I just don’t know.’ ”

Mr. Durbin, in a speech on the Senate floor, angrily recalled that the administration had similarly requested swift approval of its plan to attack Iraq. “Just as we should have asked more questions about weapons of mass destruction six years ago before we found ourselves in this war,” Mr. Durbin said, “we need to ask questions today about where this is leading.”