By Kathleen Hunter, CQ Staff

Senate Democratic leaders are pressuring Republicans with tough election contests to help them suspend the debate over gas prices long enough to let them produce results on a lot of other topics.

The majority wants quick action on a roughly 400-page megabill made up of three dozen unrelated bills, most of which have been blocked by Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn .

With the election months away, Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Democratic leaders included bills that have a local impact for a variety of rank-and-file Republican colleagues who are on the ballot. Many of the Senate’s most vulnerable Republicans — Minnesota’s Norm Coleman , Maine’s Susan Collins , Oregon’s Gordon H. Smith , New Hampshire’s John E. Sununu and Alaska’s Ted Stevens — have cosponsored several bills in the package.

Stevens, for example, is the lead sponsor of a proposal (S 39) to establish a national ocean exploration program to search for new life forms or sources of minerals, an important issue for his home state. It’s now a segment of the larger package.

Coleman is the lead sponsor of a measure (S 840) to aid torture victims and authorize grants to torture treatment centers — a significant bill in a state that takes pride in the way it has welcomed war refugees. The Minneapolis-based Center for Victims of Torture is one of the nation’s top treatment centers for torture survivors.

Coleman said July 22 that he was torn over how to vote on the package.

Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin , D-Ill., said Democratic leaders were optimistic that enough Republicans would be swayed by the popularity of the omnibus bill’s components to allow it to pass.

“If you want to oppose this package, you’re opposing a lot of things, including things that most Americans believe overwhelmingly should be part of our law — to protect against child pornography, to deal with the drug problem in our country, to try to find runaway children, to prosecute those who are guilty of civil rights crimes,” Durbin said.

It would be easy for an opponent to make campaign use of a vote against any of those elements — a point that Durbin was sure to underscore.

“If you want to cast your vote against it, I’m sure there will be many people at home with a lot of questions,” he said.

Obama Considerations

Reid, D-Nev., and the other leaders also made sure the package could offer some traction to the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama , D-Ill.

It includes Obama-backed proposals to protect children from Internet predators (S 1738), to help prosecute unsolved civil rights crimes (S 535), to increase research on postpartum depression (S1375), to increase paralysis research (S 1183), to expand broadband Internet access (S 1492) and to establish a study-abroad program named in honor of former Illinois Democratic Sen. Paul Simon (S 991).