State lawmakers agreed Tuesday that public school students should be required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance daily, but not before they argued about who should get credit for the legislation.

"It really hurts to see us come to the point where the things we fight about are who owns the flag and whether it belongs to us or whether it belongs to the House," state Sen. Dan Clodfelter, a Charlotte Democrat, said after the Senate gave final approval to a bill that would require a daily recitation of the pledge and a display of the U.S. flag in classrooms.

The bill now goes to Gov. Mike Easley for his signature.

While the pledge and the flag are two of the most basic forms of patriotic statement, the battle Tuesday to make them a daily part of students' lives was a display of legislative gamesmanship.

By the time the dust cleared, nearly every senator had cast a vote that political opponents could -- and might, in this fall's legislative elections -- argue was against the pledge and the flag.

There were at least three bills to require students to recite the pledge. The first was filed last year by Sen. Neal Hunt, a Raleigh Republican, and went nowhere. Instead, the Senate unanimously passed a similar bill filed by Sen. Julia Boseman, a Wilmington Democrat who represents a district evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.

Boseman's bill hit a wall when it reached the House.

Then, last month, the House took up an unrelated bill that had passed the Senate, stripped the bill's language and replaced it with the pledge requirement. The House passed the revised bill and sent it back to the Senate.

Senate Democrat leaders opposed the revised bill in an effort to force the House to accept Boseman's bill. But when the matter was put to a vote, Senate Democrats Janet Cowell of Raleigh, Doug Berger of Youngsville and Malcolm Graham of Charlotte did not go along, and the result was a 24-24 tie on the revised measure.

Berger said he voted for the bill because he did not want to be painted as unpatriotic. He said Boseman's bill would have difficulty passing the House because she has called for House Speaker Jim Black, a Mecklenburg County Democrat, to step down from his leadership post.

Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue, a New Bern Democrat who is eyeing a run for governor in 2008, normally breaks tie votes in the Senate as the chamber's presiding officer. But after a short recess, Perdue ruled that she did not have to vote on the bill.

Instead, Perdue let Senate Majority Leader Tony Rand, a Fayetteville Democrat, call for another vote on the bill. All the Democrats supported the parliamentary move, while Republicans opposed it. That vote, 28-21, put the bill up for a second vote.

Rand told Republicans that if they had prevailed, the bill would have died. The Senate then unanimously voted for the House bill the second time around.

The drive to require the pledge began last year with Julian Quesada, 17, an Apex high school student whose parents immigrated to the United States. He said the pledge was rarely recited in school.

Current state law encourages local school boards to provide opportunities to say the pledge and to display the flag.

In several Triangle districts, school principals decide whether students will recite the pledge.