Beyond the Dome

As soon as John McCain locked down the Republican presidential nomination, the favorite guessing game on Capitol Hill became this: What will the Democratic leadership do to make his life miserable?

It's impossible to tell how much they've been planning the Senate's agenda around McCain, or whether he's really a factor at all. But lately, the Senate has been taking up a lot of measures that just happen to highlight the differences between McCain and many of his Republican colleagues.

Take the farm bill, which McCain opposed on the grounds that it was filled with "pork-barrel spending." He didn't actually show up to vote against it, though, which may be just as well. When the Senate approved the final bill earlier this month, 35 of his Republican colleagues voted for it. And the same number voted to override Bush's veto just before the recess.

Then there was the supplemental spending bill for the Iraq war, which became the vehicle for a popular veterans' benefits bill sponsored by Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia.

Once again, McCain registered his complaints from a distance, saying the Webb bill wouldn't do enough to keep people in the armed services or let them transfer their benefits to their family members. That wasn't a problem, though, for the 25 Senate Republicans who voted for the bill.

And next week, the Senate is set to take up a bill to fight climate change - one of the biggest areas of disagreement between McCain and a sizeable chunk of the Republican Party. The bill by Independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut and Republican John W. Warner of Virginia would set up a "cap and trade" system, which McCain favors in theory, though he wants more incentives to promote nuclear power.

It's not clear yet whether McCain will return to the Senate for any part of the debate, but it's hard to see how it would help him to do that, since a large number of Republicans might just vote against the bill. They think it would be too expensive for businesses, and even those who are prepared to accept those costs want other tradeoffs. Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, for example, says the bill would impose "a massive new consumption tax" and should be balanced out with a new set of tax cuts.

These are the kinds of issues that get on the agenda in a Democratic Senate, and not just because they make McCain's life awkward. After all, climate change, veterans' benefits and farm assistance are all important issues to Democrats anyway.

But they sure do annoy McCain. "My friends, Republicans have got to stop joining with big-spending Democrats," McCain said at a town hall meeting in Reno, Nev. yesterday, speaking of the Senate Republicans who voted to override Bush's veto of the farm bill. And you know things aren't going well when you're reduced to wagging your finger at your party.