It has been a rough summer for the Senate. The Republicans’ push to pass President Donald Trump’s big, fat bill was a contentious, exhausting odyssey that left even some in the majority bruised. There have been fierce clashes over confirmation votes, including Democrats stalking out of a Judiciary Committee hearing. And the Jeffrey Epstein drama got so spicy that the House fled town early to avoid dealing with it.
While the president has been aggressively encroaching on the Senate’s authority, including usurping Congress’ power of the purse, the chamber’s troubles long predate him. Members current and former, Republican and Democratic, say the job comes with a sense of growing frustration and declining cachet. The legislative process is a hot mess and increasingly dominated by giant omnibus bills. Cross-aisle comity is passé. Independence and ideological heterodoxy are treated as heresy.
“The problem is that we can’t get s--- done,” said Tina Smith, D-Minn., who announced in February that she would not seek reelection in 2026. Creative obstructionism, she told me, has become “a fine art that has reached its apex so that the institution is nearly paralyzed.”
“It is bad — really bad,” Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told The New York Times’ Carl Hulse of the current mood. “How do we get back to doing our jobs?”
A more crucial question may be who still has the stomach for the job, let alone the desire. The number of senators fleeing the chamber is above average for an election cycle, including some younger members (by Senate standards) who have announced their retirement, such as Smith; Gary Peters, D-Mich.; and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who decided to pack it in after clashing with Trump. Two senators have announced that they are pursuing the more appealing gig of governor — Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., and Michael Bennet, D-Colo. — and others are considering following suit.
Even the majority party has had recruiting trouble. Two popular Republican governors, Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, who left office in January, and Brian Kemp of Georgia, resisted serious pressure to run for the Senate.
“It’s completely unappealing,” Sununu told me. “I see it as a step down.”
It’s a vicious cycle: The more that talented people are turned off or driven out by the chamber’s dysfunction, the more it populates with extremists, opportunists and self-dealers. The more that partisan lines are enforced, the less room there is for moderates and independents, who are now nearly extinct. In a chamber influenced heavily by seniority and groupthink, fresh ideas are rare — and rarely appreciated.
So after years of hearing senators grumble about the place, I decided to quiz current and past members about what had gone wrong and if they had thoughts on salvaging things. All had their own takes, but recurring themes emerged, along with a sense of urgency about the fractured and fraying political landscape.
“I don’t want to sound like a prepper,” Smith said. “I believe there will be a tipping point, and I think that we’re actually pretty close to it.”
‘Maximalist’ Partisanship
Once senators start eyeing the exits, they tend to get frank about their frustrations. Many blame the chamber’s growing fractiousness.
“We are in a place where there is a perpetual game of shirts and skins that is all about the maximalist partisan position,” Bennet said.
Pat Toomey, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania, said that in the new political culture, the old rules “don’t work so well.” When he arrived in 2011, “it was considered completely unacceptable to deny a colleague the opportunity to have a vote,” he said. “Now if someone is opposed to your amendment, there’s this notion that you have not sufficiently manifested your opposition unless you block even the opportunity for the amendment to get a vote.”
“Part of that has nothing to do with the Senate,” Bennet said in an interview at his Washington office. “Part of that is the utter breakdown of our campaign finance system, the collapse of journalism and the rise of social media.”
Members pointed to multiple external forces roiling Senate culture, including the conflict-maximizing algorithms of social media and the influence of big-money political donors.
Some of the body’s fracturing is a byproduct of modernity itself. The disjointed lives of legislators, jetting between Washington and their home states each week and perpetually fundraising, leave little space for building personal bonds and trust with one another.
“In the time I was here in the ’70s and ’80s, families still lived here, and families were part of the process,” Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., recalled, referring to his younger days in various jobs around Capitol Hill. “Spouses knew each other. People could argue on the floor and then go to dinner together.” Now, he said, “we are very isolated. This place is highly segregated. Every lunch is separate. We rush to the airport on Thursday night.”
Cross-aisle friendships exist, but there has been a dip in bipartisan socializing. “The Senate women used to get together six times a year, and we really don’t do that anymore,” Smith said.
In his Senate days, Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., appeared in a reality TV series, “Rival Survival,” in which he and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., were stranded together on a desert island for six days. When I asked Flake how to fix the chamber, he sent me an ad for the old show.
“I’d love to see more Democrats and Republicans marooned together,” he joked in an email. “Crawling along the jungle floor foraging for food and sharing coconuts may not be senatorial, but the longer you survive, the less you worry about who sleeps with the machete.”
Trash TV aside, Flake is serious about the need for opportunities for senators to relate as real people. He said bipartisan delegations abroad can provide such a space — something numerous lawmakers told me over the years. As illustration, he sent a video of himself and Chris Coons, D-Del., fleeing charging elephants in Mozambique.
A Need for Reform
When it comes to procedure, senators have a raft of ideas for updating the chamber’s rules to meet this less collegial political moment.
The maneuver that generates the most heat — and the most hate from Democrats and from Trump — is the filibuster, which enables even just one senator to stop a bill’s progress until at least 60 of his or her colleagues invoke cloture. The senators I spoke with called not for ending the practice so much as reforming it to require actual effort. The most commonly floated proposal was to bring back the talking filibuster, in which a bill’s opponents must stay on the Senate floor speaking continuously, versus the current system, which lets members quietly tell the majority leader they want to stall a bill.
“You have to have some skin in the game,” said former Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., who lost reelection last November. “You just can’t say, ‘I’m going to obstruct, then I’m going to go home’” while the hold stays in place, gumming up the works.
A talking filibuster would also provide transparency, letting the public decide “whether you’re heroes or bums,” Merkley said.
An equally fierce and more bipartisan gripe from senators targeted the breakdown of the amendment process. That sounds eye-glazing but has major ramifications for which issues get attention.
Not long ago, even the most junior senator could bring an issue to the floor by introducing an amendment to a bill. But Senate leaders have been tightening their grip on the process in recent years, allowing only amendments they feel comfortable having their whole caucus vote on. This cuts rank-and-file senators out of the process, and it means that big, complicated issues rarely get seriously chewed over.
One of the knottiest impediments to making the Senate a less toxic, more functional place, multiple members said, is the intransigence of the parties’ most animated supporters. More than one senator noted that breaking party ranks can earn you a pile-on from social media users, activists and many base voters.
“There is simply no reward for reaching across the aisle,” Flake said.
“If you’re a rock thrower, that behavior gets rewarded far more than being a problem solver,” Peters agreed. “It’s about a base that is very energized, on both sides. They’re folks that you know you’ve got to deal with.”
So it is that senators are grappling with a classic chicken-or-egg conundrum: a chamber warped by extreme polarization being fueled by an angry, alienated chunk of voters who want their teams to respond with even more rigid partisanship.
Something’s got to give, say senators, voicing conviction that most constituents want the chamber to turn back from this dark path.
“There’s a lot of evidence that we’re headed down that road as a country,” Bennet said, “but I don’t think that’s where the American people want us to go.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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