Robert J. Dole, in one of his last visits to the Senate, lost a big vote. It came not at the hands of Democrats, whom he battled for more than 27 years, including more than a decade as Senate Republican leader.

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       Instead, in December 2012, Dole sat off to the Republican side of the chamber, in his wheelchair, as his own side of the aisle abandoned him on a vote that helped set the tone for GOP politics over the next decade and perhaps beyond.

       The Barack Obama administration, along with senior Republicans and Democrats, tried to gain entry into a United Nations treaty that would compel other nations to upgrade their standards in treating the disabled, a personal issue for Dole, who co-authored the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990.

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       Supporters included the top Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar (Ind.), and Armed Services Committee, John McCain (Ariz.), who, like Dole, had suffered disabling wartime injuries.

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       But just eight Republicans joined all 53 members of the Democratic caucus in voting yes, falling six votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed to approve a treaty; 38 Republicans rejected the treaty.

       Some claimed to not like the timing of the vote, less than a month before a new Congress would be sworn in. Many cited bizarre claims that entering that treaty would create new rules for home-schooling, even though the U.N. has absolutely no authority to regulate American education standards. The effort, fueled by conservative online activists, spooked many Republicans who had started to live in political fear of primary challenges.

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       So Dole watched the humiliating defeat on the Senate floor as a guest, 16 years after his retirement.

       “Rejecting the treaty was, in effect, rejecting our own values as embodied in the Americans With Disabilities Act,” Ross K. Baker, a congressional scholar at Rutgers University, recalled Friday in an interview.

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       Baker watched that 2012 vote from above in the gallery as he finished another stint as a Senate fellow, something he did every few years when he took a teaching sabbatical. He made the U.N. treaty vote the focus of the opening chapter in his 2015 book, “Is Bipartisanship Dead? A Report From the Senate.”

       The answer to Baker’s question, in this particular case, was pretty much yes.

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       The modern Republican Party had largely moved on from Dole’s vision — shared by most senior GOP officials from the era of the Reagan and Bush administrations — that the United States needed to be a force for global inspiration, trying to compel other nations to model their behavior after American ideals.

       Dole regularly found himself in the hawk wing of GOP policy alongside McCain. In late 1995, as the scattered states of Yugoslavia escalated their civil war, Dole pushed President Bill Clinton for a stronger response and eventually supported the administration’s approach.

       Bob Dole, the longtime senator from Kansas and 1996 Republican presidential nominee, died on Dec. 5 at 98. (Joshua Carroll, Jayne Orenstein/The Washington Post)

       By late 2012, after President Obama had won a second term, many Republicans had pulled back from a strong international presence. This began before Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign three years later, an initial long-shot bid that harnessed the already growing nativist views of conservatives and put rocket fuel in it.

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       By the time of the U.N. treaty for the disabled vote, some Republicans had also become susceptible to online activism spurred by sometimes fringe elements of their coalition.

       Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) led the opposition, claiming that a separate commission created in the treaty would lead to infringements on U.S. sovereignty and compel home-schooling parents to adopt other nations’ demands.

       Others created whatever rationale they could find to vote no. “The hard reality is that there are nation-states, like China, who do like to sign up to these organizations and gain the reputation for doing good things while, in fact, not doing good things,” said then-Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), the No. 2 on Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s leadership team.

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       What had become clear, at that point, was that many traditional Republicans feared their voters, particularly when it came to low-turnout primary campaigns against ideological challenges from the right.

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       In 2010 and 2012, traditional Republicans lost more than a handful of primary contests to more ideological candidates, a political trend that could be seen in two GOP senators who led competing wings of that U.N. treaty debate: Lugar, who lost his 2012 primary to a conservative who went on to lose the general election, and Lee, who two years earlier had ousted an 18-year veteran closely aligned with McConnell.

       When that vote was held, 13 Republicans were heading into the 2014 election cycle, a dozen from states that had a strong GOP lean. All 12 of them voted against the treaty, including longtime friends of Dole like Sens. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) and Pat Roberts (Kan.).

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       “The opponents were influenced by groups that trafficked in untruth, including the unfounded charge that our adherence to the treaty would undermine home-schooling and foster abortion. These were accusations concocted in the minds of nocturnal conspiracy brokers,” Baker recalled.

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       Some Republicans suggested that they would consider that treaty once a dozen new senators were sworn in a few weeks later. That never occurred, not in the next two years of Democratic control, nor in the six years after that when McConnell held the majority leader post, and no movement in the past 11 months of Democratic control of the Senate.

       More than 180 nations have signed on to the treaty, including every major U.S. ally from Japan to Israel, with just a handful of holdouts.

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       But Republicans continue to resist. “I don’t think the United Nations should be making determinations about domestic policy in the United States,” Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), who sits in Dole’s old seat, told McClatchy News a few days ago.

       Dole made peace with this nativist wing of the party. He was the only former GOP presidential nominee to endorse Trump for president in 2016. Two years later, he asked Trump to be the headline speaker when Dole received the Congressional Gold Medal, maintaining his support through the 2020 election.

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       After the Jan. 6 riots, he told USA Today that Biden had clearly won the election and said he was by then “sort of Trumped out.”

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       It seemed like an odd fit, given how Trump had publicly mocked a reporter with a disability. Dole had always been proud of his work for the disabled and saw it as an offshoot for helping wounded veterans, having lost the use of his right arm from brutal World War II injuries.

       He saw the U.N. treaty as an extension of that work, a chance to force other nations to provide their disabled the same foundation that the ADA created here. By then he was 89 and in a wheelchair, but McCain and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), a few weeks away from becoming secretary of state, brought Dole in the day of the vote, using his privileges as a former senator to be on the floor.

       They thought it might win a few votes.

       “This is about common humanity,” Kerry said during the closing remarks, before pointing to their old colleague. “Don’t let Senator Bob Dole down.”

       They did.