While Republicans and Democrats squabble over cyber security legislation provisions, businesses are being left in the lurch.

There are critical areas of dispute in legislation that Congress is considering. Republicans have said a bill proposed by Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., is too regulatory and that businesses should not have to contend with more rules. Meanwhile, others have questioned whether businesses can effectively address these issues on their own.

Another major stumbling block is privacy concerns and the extent to which these will be protected under the various bills. For instance, the Obama administration has contended that the bill passed by the House in April, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, would repeal important provisions of electronic surveillance law without introducing corresponding privacy safeguards.

These are legitimate issues for Congress to consider and, hopefully, resolve.

But in the meantime, businesses are being left with a patchwork of state laws in the area of cyber security and privacy that have made it increasingly difficult for them to continue to conduct business across state lines. Making life more difficult for business doesn’t help anybody.

Despite the disagreements, there probably are many points concerning cyber security and privacy about which both sides in Congress would agree. For instance, establishing a set definition of personally identifiable information or not requiring notifications until a threshold number of consumers are affected by data breaches would be noncontroversial.

Yet, while Congress indulges in its election-year partisanship, nothing is being done.

This leaves two options: Congress should hash out its differences and, after years of inaction, come up with compromise legislation that finally does something. The second, perhaps less desirable, option is for congressional leaders to get together and produce legislation that at least addresses the issues on which they can agree readily, and then work out their basic differences on the regulatory and privacy issues in a measured way.

Either way, businesses finally would get some clear directions without being distracted and hampered by conflicting state laws. That way, everybody wins.