Beyond the Dome

It looks like the Senate Democratic leadership has found an easy way to pick up a Hillary Rodham Clinton proposal without inviting all the problems that come with a presidential candidate's legislation.

The answer, it turns out, was to muddy the waters.

When the Senate takes up the latest supplemental spending bill for the Iraq war this week, it will consider an amendment full of policy restrictions on the war, including a provision that would require the Bush administration to get congressional approval for any long-term security agreement with Iraq.

It's an idea Clinton has introduced as legislation and championed repeatedly on the campaign trail. She also promoted the bill while questioning Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last month.

If Clinton wanted to come back from the campaign trail and try to push her legislation through the Senate, the supplemental spending bill would have been the perfect place to attach it as an amendment. But that scenario would have presented Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada with all sorts of headaches. It could have looked like Reid was giving Clinton a forum at Barack Obama's expense, and it could have become a magnet for Republican amendments.

The reality, though, is that lots of other Democratic senators favored the idea too - including Obama. So the version in the supplemental spending bill is a generic one. It's the same basic idea as Clinton's bill, but it's not the same language word-for-word. It's already included in the policy amendment, so there would be no need for Clinton to return to the Senate to push for it.

And the actual language was worked out between the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and several other players, including Senate Appropriations Committee Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, and Sens. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, John Kerry of Massachusetts, and Jim Webb of Virginia, according to Appropriations Committee spokesman Jesse Jacobs.

As Jacobs put it, the provision is "a child with many parents." That fact may not make the measure an easy sell in the Senate, but it's likely to take a lot of the presidential campaign sting out of it.