Wednesday was not a good day for Senator Mitch McConnell's single-minded project to make Barack Obama a one-term president. Over the minority leader's objections, 13 Republicans joined every Democratic senator to ratify the New Start nuclear arms treaty with Russia, reducing the size of the countries' nuclear stockpiles and making the world a safer place, the New York Times said in an editorial. Excerpts: The Senate also unanimously approved a bill to pay for the medical care of workers who cleaned up ground zero after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, coming to its senses after McConnell and other Republicans blocked the bill 13 days earlier, causing a national uproar. These deeply gratifying developments hardly spell the end of partisanship, which is likely to return with a vengeance in the next Congress. But they do suggest that many Republicans are willing to reject McConnell's particularly noxious version, under which any bill, no matter how beneficial for the country, can be blown up if it could be seen as a victory for President Obama. In the obstructionist climate of the 111th Congress, the ratification could be done only in the last hours. McConnell and his allies, notably Jon Kyl of Arizona, put up a series of specious arguments to delay it, mostly centering around a fiction: that the treaty would prevent the United States from erecting a missile defense system. Their efforts backfired, making Obama's victory ring more loudly that it should have. __
