To free senators from threat of de-selection and ensure independence from party whips, they would be elected for long terms and could not be re-elected.
"Cookies have gotten bad press as a surveillance tool, but they also make Web site visits faster and online transactions more hassle-free," Senator Leahy said in an e-mail response to a reporter's questions.
By freeing senators to vote as they wished, the administration expected that they would combine the weakest elements of both bills in to the final legislation.
He had served as a Free State senator, and, after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, was the country's public man of letters.
"Polluted countryside repre sents the antithesis of free dom," Senator Gaylord Nelson, originator of the Earth Day idea, said in a talk to the Massachusetts Legislature in Boston.
"It has to go over my shoulder, so my hands are free," said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, toting a very sensible-looking black purse while waiting for the subway recently.
Republican opponents said the treaty reflected a dangerous and naïve approach by Mr. Obama to the world, "a foreign policy that sends a message of timidity" in search of "a fantasy world that's nuclear free," as Senator John Cornyn of Texas put it.
(He was delighted to be named a Free State senator: "A 60-year-old smiling public man". He supervised a redesigned coinage featuring barn animals instead of the English king. (The government called in a livestock expert to adjust the bull).
Millen was an early leader in the Senate, serving as deputy to Josiah Symon's unofficial leadership of the Free Trade Senators in 1901.
It is no secret that he still resents the way Mr. Corzine steamrolled him while deciding whether to challenge the free-spending senator in a Democratic gubernatorial primary, and he can't be relishing the prospect of giving up the stage he has appeared on -- from Trenton to New Orleans -- for the past year.
Neild was not a supporter of party discipline, refusing to follow Sir Josiah Symon's leadership of the Free Trade Senators.
