Beyond the Dome

John McCain may not have been in the Senate today to vote with his fellow warrior against “pork barrel” spending — Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma — but he was there in spirit.

This afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada tried to bundle a bunch of measures Coburn has blocked into one big package and tried to push them through the Senate. He failed; the package came up eight votes short of the 60 it needed.

Reid warned that Republicans would pay a price for voting against measures to help investigate unsolved civil-rights-era murders, fund programs for homeless youths, and boost research to help people with Lou Gehrig’s disease. McCain, however, sided with Coburn and said the roughly $8 billion package “represents Washington at its worst.”

“I urge all of my colleagues to support Senator Coburn in his efforts to rid the federal government of wasteful pork barrel spending and to vote against the Reid Omnibus legislation loaded with provisions for special interests,” McCain said in a statement just before the vote. “While there are certainly parts of it that are worthwhile, I hope this measure will not pass.”

Like Coburn, McCain has taken loud stands against “wasteful” spending throughout his Senate career in ways that have angered his colleagues. These days, he doesn’t usually show up to vote against spending bills he opposes, but he does go on record against them rather than simply dodging the issue.

By contrast, Barack Obama — who has worked with Coburn on several open-government measures, including a federal spending database that remains one of Obama’s main Senate achievements — was nowhere to be found.