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McConnell agreed with the sentiment of retiring Sen. Dodd (D-Conn.), who has counseled the young Democrats to retain the filibuster. According to McConnell and Dodd, the current 59-41 split created an environment in which Democrats focus their efforts on securing just one or two Republican votes, but if Republicans pick up four or more seats in November, the Senate would produce more cross-aisle legislation.

Republican leaders, though, were only too happy to cast cap and trade as “cap and tax.” In the process, they helped scare away senators who had long supported this very idea, like Lindsey Graham. The sad paradox is that cap and trade — which trusts in the efficiency of markets — was originally a Republican policy, signed by the first President Bush to reduce acid rain, and disliked at the time by many liberals.

Democratic senators are planning to put the right of citizens to challenge corporate power at the center of their critique of activist conservative judging, offering a case that has not been fully aired since the days of the great Progressive Era Justice Louis Brandeis.

It was the chant heard around the Senate: Angry GOP delegates in Utah calling out "TARP! TARP! TARP!" as they tossed Sen. Robert F. Bennett from the primary ballot, punishment for the veteran lawmaker's 2008 vote to bail out the financial sector.

The Democrats' legislative "framework" includes a slew of new immigration enforcement measures aimed at U.S. borders and workplaces. It would further expand the 20,000-member Border Patrol; triple fines against U.S. employers that hire illegal immigrants; and, most controversially, require all American workers -- citizens and non-citizens alike -- to get new Social Security cards linked to their fingerprints to ease work eligibility checks.

“There’s a hundred senators here, and I don’t know if there is a senator that doesn’t have something in this bill that was important to them,” Mr. Reid said. “If they don’t have something in it important to them, then it doesn’t speak well of them. That’s what this legislation is all about. It’s the art of compromise.”

WASHINGTON — Buried in the deal-clinching health care package that Senate Democrats unveiled over the weekend is an inconspicuous proposal expanding Medicare to cover certain victims of “environmental health hazards.”

Now that the Senate Democratic leadership has stripped the last vestige of the public option — the Medicare buy-in provision — from its bill, progressives are feeling doubly betrayed.

The Medicare buy-in proposal represented a drastically scaled-back version of the original public option and was envisioned as offering coverage to individuals between the ages of 55 and 64 who do not have access to employer benefits. Reid and senior White House officials were prepared to narrow the framework of the plan, essentially walling it off from the Medicare program while vastly reducing the pool of potential beneficiaries.

For instance, Senator Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat who has been a less-than-strong supporter of the present health care bill, recently told The Times, “I am responsible to the people of Arkansas, and that is where I will take my direction.” But where does she look for her cue? Hers is a poor state whose voters support health care subsidies six percentage points more than the national average. On the other hand, Mr. Obama got just 40 percent of the vote there.