In 2015, former Senate leaders Tom Daschle and Trent Lott published a book called Crisis Point: Why We Must—and How We Can—Overcome Our Broken Politics in Washington and across America.1 Daschle and Lott represented the epitome of Washington’s political establishment. After a combined fifty-nine years in Congress, they continued to work in the nation’s capital as strategic advisers, lobbyists, board members, and leading participants in the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Lott, the Senate majority leader from 1996 to 2001, came from a sharecropper family in Mississippi, and one of his earliest political activities was lobbying in favor of maintaining the racial segregation of his fraternity at Ole Miss; he was one of the first of the generation of Southern Republicans who capitalized on popular opposition to civil rights to turn the South red. Daschle, a Democrat who succeeded Lott as Senate majority leader, serving from 2001 to 2004, was a former Air Force intelligence officer who won his seat in Congress in a prairie-populist state that had previously elected George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee.
It is impossible today to imagine Senate leaders from opposite sides of the aisle—say, Mitch McConnell and Charles Schumer—writing a book together. But Daschle and Lott were from a different generation. They had worked together amicably and were aghast at the vicious partisan divide that had come to characterize the Senate in the years since they had left office. They had many reasons, as active lobbyists, not to be critical of Capitol Hill, and they had a natural reluctance to criticize their successors as Senate leaders. Consequently, their unflinching indictment carried an extra force:
America’s strength has always come from its unique diversity—its willingness to not just permit but to encourage competing viewpoints in order to strengthen the whole. The adversarial system, embedded by the Founding Fathers into our system of government, was meant to spur debate, challenge complacency, and drive progress. It has sustained our Republic for over 225 years, but we have to face a sad truth: it has stopped working.2
Daschle and Lott’s anguished assessment was widely shared by journalists, historians, the senators themselves, and the American public. Despite their different vantage points, they all saw the federal government failing the American people. Congress lurched from crisis to crisis, unable to pass a budget and appropriations laws to run the country, forced instead to resort to last-minute, omnibus continuing resolutions. In each Congress, the number of laws passed declined; the number of filibusters increased. Increasingly ineffectual Congresses ceded more and more power to the president and ultimately to the Supreme Court. Talented legislative dealmakers from both parties quit in frustration. Public approval of Congress, declining since the 1960s, spiraled downward, as more and more Americans concluded that Washington worked only to protect and further the interests of the wealthiest.
Daschle and Lott recognized that the Senate had become ground zero for America’s political dysfunction, the political institution that had failed America the longest and the worst. The Senate’s failure was particularly crippling because it is supposed to be the balance wheel and moderating force in the American constitutional system, the place where the two parties come together to find common ground through vigorous debate and principled compromise to advance the national interest. The House of Representatives was designed to be the people’s chamber, subject to short, two-year terms that are apt to reflect changing passions and priorities. It had 65 members in 1790, a number that continued to grow with the population until 1929, when the House established its current size of 435 members. The Senate, with its six-year terms and limit of two senators per state, was the elite chamber, what Walter Mondale once described as “the nation’s mediator” and Howard Baker called the nation’s “board of directors.” But to perform that role, the Senate required a bipartisan comity that disappeared long ago. Without that bipartisan comity, the Senate not only reflects the polarization in the country but also exacerbates that polarization by demonstrating it constantly at the highest and most visible level of government.
The Senate’s long decline has been acutely painful to a generation that grew up with a special attachment to it. The Senate first gained the attention of many Americans in 1939 with Frank Capra’s film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, starring Jimmy Stewart as an idealistic young senator who battles political corruption. The film, widely regarded as a classic, catapulted Stewart to stardom and captured eleven Academy Award nominations. It created in the minds of Americans an indelible image of what a filibuster should be, and more recent, real-life filibusters by Rand Paul or Ted Cruz would always draw unfavorable comparison to Stewart’s valiant effort.
But the Senate truly seized the attention of the American public in 1950 when Estes Kefauver, a little-known Democratic senator from Tennessee, launched an extraordinary series of investigative hearings into organized crime in America.3 The “Kefauver hearings,” as they became universally known, took place in fourteen cities around the country. They illuminated the workings of the Mafia and forced J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, to admit that organized crime was a national problem. Television was still very new in America, and the Kefauver hearings became the first nationally shared television experience, viewed by more than thirty million Americans in their homes, bars, restaurants, and movie theaters. At one time, an astonishing 72 percent of Americans expressed familiarity with the committee’s work.
During eight days of hearings in New York in March 1951, more than fifty witnesses described the highest-ranking crime syndicate in America, an organization allegedly led by Frank Costello, who had taken over from Lucky Luciano. “The week of March 12, 1951 will occupy a special place in history,” Life reported. “People had suddenly gone indoors into living room[s], taverns, and clubrooms, auditoriums, and back-offices. There, in eerie half-light, looking at millions of small frosty screens, people sat as if charmed. Never had the attention of the nation been riveted so completely on a single matter.” Time wrote, “From Manhattan as far west as the coaxial cable ran, the U.S. adjusted itself to Kefauver’s schedule. Dishes stood in sinks, babies went unfed, business sagged, and department stores emptied while the hearings went on.”
The Senate continued to be a source of fascination through the 1950s. In 1954, the country again became enthralled, by the “Army-McCarthy hearings,” conducted by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, into Senator Joseph McCarthy’s demagogic charges that the US Army was infiltrated by communists. The hearings produced one of the most famous moments in American political history when Joseph Welch, the army’s chief counsel, challenged the junior senator from Wisconsin: “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” That dramatic exchange highlighted a hearing that sent McCarthy’s popularity into a tailspin and opened the door to his censure by the Senate, ending the “Red Scare” that he had done so much to precipitate.
In 1956, John F. Kennedy, a little-known Massachusetts senator, published the book Profiles in Courage, eloquently describing inordinate acts of political courage and sacrifice by eight of his senatorial predecessors.4 Profiles in Courage would become one of the most indelible phrases in American life and one of the best-known political books ever written, winning the Pulitzer Prize and springboarding Kennedy to national prominence.
In 1959, Allen Drury, a New York Times reporter covering the Senate, wrote Advise and Consent, a novel about a brutal Senate confirmation fight over Robert Leffingwell, a liberal nominated to be secretary of state. Advise and Consent became the most famous political novel ever written. It spent 112 weeks on the best-seller list, and the movie version, with memorable scenes of Senate floor debate and off-the-floor intrigue, captivated many Americans. In 2009, Thomas Mallon, writing for the New York Times Book Review, observed, “Fifty years later, most of the subject matter remains recognizable. Drury’s 99 men and one lone woman wrestle with the issue of pre-emptive war, the degree of severity with which lying under oath must be viewed, and the way that the coverup is invariably worse than the crime.”5 Scott Simon of National Public Radio, writing in the Wall Street Journal, put it succinctly: “Fifty years after publication and astounding success, Allen Drury’s novel remains the definitive Washington tale.”6
By the end of the 1950s, many Americans found the Senate familiar and thought they understood it: the high-profile investigations, the all-night filibusters, the occasional acts of conscience, the behind-the-scenes intrigue. John Kennedy’s glamour and rise to the presidency further bolstered the Senate’s standing in America. In the 1960 election, Kennedy narrowly prevailed over Vice President Richard Nixon (himself a former senator), and both presidential candidates chose as their running mates other familiar figures from the Senate: Lyndon Johnson, the incumbent Senate majority leader, and Henry Cabot Lodge, a former senator from Massachusetts.
The Senate’s visibility and glamour masked a darker reality. In his 2005 book The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate, the political historian Lewis L. Gould reached a depressing conclusion: “For protracted periods—at the start of the twentieth century, in the era of Theodore Roosevelt, during the 1920s, and again for domestic issues in the post-World War II era—the Senate functioned not merely as a source of conservative reflections on the direction of society but as a force to genuinely impede the nation’s vitality and evolution.”7
Throughout the 1950s, as the Senate became recognizable and fascinating to many Americans, it remained dominated by Southern senators who used their seniority, committee chairmanships, and the filibuster to bottle up civil rights and other progressive legislation. The Senate was, in the words of the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and journalist William White, “The South’s permanent revenge for Gettysburg . . . the only place in the country where the South did not lose the Civil War.”8 In the late 1950s, Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson would use his extraordinary energy and force of personality to drag the Senate, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century. Johnson spearheaded the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, a modest measure but the first ever to prevail over the fierce opposition of Southern senators.9
It was in the 1960s and 1970s that the Senate finally reached its potential, playing a central role in facing the challenges and seizing the opportunities presented during crisis years in America.10 The Senate of that era was an extraordinary collection of individuals whose character had been forged in the fires of the Great Depression and World War II. Their ranks included many veterans, some of whom—Daniel Inouye, Robert Dole, Philip Hart, and Paul Douglas—still lived with the pain of grievous war wounds. Having been involved in the invasions of Normandy, Italy, and Iwo Jima, they did not believe that casting a hard vote was the most difficult thing they would ever do.
The senators of this era were disproportionately progressives, and while they were mostly Democrats, even the Republican ranks included some liberals and many moderates. They had a shared sense of America’s destiny and recognized the existential challenge posed by the Soviet Union in the Cold War. They were members of what the journalist Tom Brokaw would later call “the Greatest Generation,” those who had been part of America’s triumph but were aware of our country’s shortcomings, particularly where the treatment of black Americans was concerned.
They also benefited from an extraordinary leader. Although Lyndon Johnson would always be remembered as “the master of the Senate,” immortalized in Robert Caro’s magisterial biography, it was his successor, Montana’s Mike Mansfield, the laconic, pipe-smoking professor of Asian history turned politician, who would lead the Senate for sixteen years through its period of greatest accomplishment.11
Mansfield was an improbable leader in all respects. He had no interest in the position and accepted it reluctantly only after President-elect John Kennedy, a close friend, asked him to do so. Lyndon Johnson had convinced most political observers that the Senate required a very strong leader, but Johnson’s tactics—which included intimidation, learning senators’ weaknesses and exploiting them, and depriving those he disliked of major committee positions, staff, and budgets—repelled Mansfield. As Tom Daschle and Trent Lott would later write in Crisis Point, “It’s unlikely that [Mansfield] twisted one arm in his sixteen years in charge.”
Even more fundamentally, Mansfield did not believe in a Senate dominated by its leaders and a few senior senators. He believed in a democratic Senate, in which all senators were adults and all senators were equal, having been elected by their constituents. He even treated senators in the minority as equals. To a degree that stunned his colleagues, Mansfield believed in the “golden rule” and acted accordingly. He treated each senator the way he wanted to be treated himself, and he expected reciprocity.
Most senators, starting with Everett McKinley Dirksen, the legendary Republican minority leader, doubted that Mansfield could possibly run the Senate in that way. And initially events seemed to prove the skeptics correct: Mansfield’s democratized Senate, operating without a leader’s whip, quickly became paralyzed. By the fall of 1963, Mansfield’s leadership was subject to such fierce criticism that he prepared a floor speech explaining his approach to leadership and offering to resign if the senators did not like it. It included an eloquent explanation of how he viewed the Senate: “The Constitutional authority does not lie with the leadership. It lies with all of us individually, collectively, and equally. . . . In the end it is not the senators as individuals who are of fundamental importance. In the end, it is the institution of the Senate itself, as one of the foundations of the Constitution. It is the Senate as one of the rocks of the Republic.”
Mansfield never delivered the speech. It had to be inserted in the Congressional Record because several hours after he informed the Senate of his intent to speak, the country received word that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.
Mansfield’s leadership would never be questioned again. Galvanized by the tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination, the leadership of President Lyndon Johnson, and the moral imperative to take action on civil rights, Mansfield’s democratized Senate met the challenge of history. In the summer of 1964, with the country and the world watching, the Senate broke the filibuster of the Southern bloc to enact what is generally regarded as one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Senate would go from there to an extraordinary period of activism and productivity. Under Mansfield’s leadership, the Senate would no longer be the gridlocked graveyard of progressive dreams. It became the place where those hopes and dreams were translated into the legislation, moved forward with presidents where possible or, where necessary, despite them.
After tragically acquiescing in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which President Johnson would use as a “blank check” to escalate the Vietnam War, the Senate became the forum in which the war was debated and that ultimately forced Richard Nixon, Johnson’s successor, to negotiate its end. And after the abuses of Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign came to light, the Senate unanimously created a select committee to investigate the allegations. What became known as the Senate Watergate Committee paved the way for the exposure of Nixon’s crimes and his resignation. Reacting to the lessons learned from the “imperial presidency” of Johnson and Nixon, the Senate then investigated the abuses committed by America’s intelligence agencies, limited the president’s ability to wage war, and established a budget process to regain Congress’s power over the purse.
Mansfield and his Republican counterparts—first Dirksen and then Hugh Scott—built a Senate based on trust and mutual respect.12 Mansfield’s Senate was bipartisan to the core. Everyone—senators and staff—knew it was impossible to get anything done on a partisan basis. The majority leader himself ate breakfast every morning with his best friend, Vermont’s Republican senator George Aiken. When a Democratic staff member would suggest a new initiative to his boss, the first response would always be “Get a Republican co-sponsor.”
During most of the 1960s and 1970s, the Senate, although a political institution, was surprisingly free from partisanship. The herculean effort to secure civil rights for black Americans, the tragedy of Vietnam, the crisis of Watergate, checking the “imperial presidency” of Johnson and Nixon—these were not partisan issues, and the Senate responded in a bipartisan way. Thanks to Dirksen’s leadership, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed with the votes of twenty-five out of thirty-three Republican senators, even though Arizona’s Barry Goldwater, about to accept the Republican presidential nomination, opposed it. Democratic senators like Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, George McGovern, J. William Fulbright, and Frank Church were joined by Republicans like George Aiken, John Sherman Cooper, Mark Hatfield, and Charles Goodell in opposing the Vietnam War. Watergate had the potential to divide on partisan lines, but Sam Ervin and Howard Baker, the Senate Watergate Committee’s Democratic chairman and Republican vice chairman, understood that a partisan split would destroy the committee, and they worked closely together to avoid it. The great issues that threatened the country’s stability were too important; the senators understood the stakes.
US senators take an oath to “support and defend the Constitution,” but there was also an unspoken oath in Mansfield’s Senate, a shared concept of what it meant to be a senator. The people of their states had given them the incredible privilege and honor of being US senators, the most venerable title that the Republic can bestow, along with a six-year term, usually leading to multiple terms. These senators would have the opportunity to deal with the full spectrum of issues, domestic and foreign, and they would develop unique expertise, valuable to the Senate and the country. In return, when they sorted out the competing, cascading pressures on them, they would serve their states and would not forget their party allegiance, but the national interest was overriding. Every state had many officials at the local and state levels working to protect that state’s interests. But each state had only two US senators.
The second part of the unspoken oath was an obligation to help make the Senate work. As Mansfield noted, “In the end, it is not the individual senators who are important. It is the institution of the Senate.” The senators understood that the nation relied on the Senate to take collective action. Understanding that brought a commitment to passionate, but not unlimited, debate, tolerance of opposing views, principled compromise, and a willingness to vote bills up or down, even if it sometimes meant losing.
Those qualities characterized Mansfield’s Senate and its members. A liberal like Hubert Humphrey and a conservative like Barry Goldwater may have been ideological polar opposites, but they were also great friends, and no one doubted their commitment to the national interest and to the institution of the Senate. Because of those overriding commitments, the members of Mansfield’s Senate competed and cooperated, clashed and compromised, and then went out to dinner together.
Mansfield was a great leader for the Senate in crisis times. On March 4, 1976, with the Vietnam War ended and Nixon gone, as the United States prepared for its bicentennial, Mansfield stunned his colleagues and the country by announcing his intention to retire. “There is a time to stay, and a time to go,” Mansfield told the Senate. “Thirty-four years in the House and Senate is not a long time”—to a scholar of Asian history—“but it is long enough.”
Mansfield would have been the first to say that no leader is indispensable, and his successors proved him right. In November 1976, America, reacting to Watergate, turned to an outsider president, Jimmy Carter, the former governor of Georgia. Mansfield’s successor as majority leader was Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, one of the most conservative Democrats, a former Ku Klux Klan member and opponent of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, who had won the confidence of his caucus through hard work as Mansfield’s deputy, as well as constant personal growth. With the retirement of Hugh Scott, the Senate Republicans also had to choose a new leader, and they selected Howard Baker, who had become a national celebrity through his memorable work with Sam Ervin on the Watergate committee.
Byrd and Baker were an odd couple—“the grind and natural,” one Senate historian called them.13 Despite having served together for a decade, they were not particularly close friends. In their first meeting after they were chosen, Baker asked Byrd for one thing: “Don’t ever surprise me.” Byrd asked whether he could consider the request overnight; he agreed to it the next day.
Yet they became a superb leadership team. President Carter was an unusual politician, who disliked political small talk, politicians, and the give-and-take of politics. He had hated the Georgia legislature and saw members of Congress as captives of special interests or at least too willing to bend to their views. Carter’s training as an engineer, combined with a powerful intellect and inordinate self-confidence, convinced him that if he studied a problem closely enough, he could find the right answer, decide what was in the national interest, and pursue it irrespective of political fallout. Carter saw the presidency as a steward-ship, and as the only person elected by the whole country, he was the nation’s steward.
Compromise, however, is the lifeblood of politics, and Jimmy Carter did not believe in compromise. Plainly, the Senate and Carter were not natural bedfellows, and their initial dealings were rocky. Yet for four years, with the leadership of Byrd and Baker, the Senate worked with Carter and helped him to singular achievements in domestic and foreign policy. While Carter is often recalled as a failed president, recent historians have credited him with a stunning record of accomplishments in domestic and foreign policy.14 During the Carter presidency, the United States adopted a national energy policy, deregulated the airlines and much of the economy, provided financial rescues for New York City and the Chrysler Corporation, preserved much of the pristine wilderness of Alaska, and approved the fiercely controversial Panama Canal treaties. Decades later, Carter would write, “Barack Obama faced many of the same problems that I did. But I had one advantage: a Congress that I could work with.” By that he meant the Senate, led by Byrd and Baker.
Carter could not ultimately overcome double-digit inflation or the crisis of American hostages held for more than a year in the US embassy in Tehran. In the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan won in a landslide that also swept in thirteen new Republican senators. The progressive Democratic Senate of the 1960s and 1970s became the conservative Republican Senate of the 1980s. Byrd and Baker exchanged jobs, and the Senate regrouped and picked up its work. During Reagan’s first term, the Senate enacted a historic tax cut and increased defense spending; it also went on to save the Social Security system with an extraordinary bipartisan deal.
When Baker, whose leadership inspired affection and respect, chose to retire in 1984 after three terms in the Senate, Bob Dole, who had compiled a powerful record of accomplishment as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, became the majority leader. The Senate worked with the Reagan administration to enact a sweeping revision of the tax code, comprehensive immigration reform, and a reform of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When Reagan’s presidency was shaken by revelations that his administration had sold arms to Iran and used the proceeds to illegally fund the right-wing “contras” in Nicaragua, the Senate unanimously created a special committee that investigated, and defused, the most serious threat to the presidency since Watergate. The Senate managed to function as an independent institution throughout the Reagan presidency, never simply rubber-stamping the White House’s agenda or failing to investigate wrongdoing on partisan grounds.
But things were changing in the House of Representatives, with an increasingly ideological Republican membership.15 Newt Gingrich, a congressman from Georgia who rose to prominence in the late 1980s, was the leader of a growing caucus of Republican representatives who did not subscribe to the go-along-to-get-along posture of more establishment House Republicans. They had been in the minority since 1954, and Gingrich believed they were much too comfortable accepting that status. He initiated a series of novel psychological tactics, like training fellow Republicans on how to use language to degrade their opponents unfairly and to pursue ethics violations on the part of Democrats that were left alone when committed by Republicans. Led by Gingrich’s crusading spirit, year by year the once-conservative Republican party became ever more radical. When the Republicans gained control of the House in 1994, Gingrich became speaker, and his aggressive, no-holds-barred vision of partisan warfare became institutionalized on the House side of the Capitol.
Gingrich’s rise was the culmination of a political evolution that had begun with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which had led to an exodus of conservative white Southerners from the Democratic Party. Lyndon Johnson had said after signing the legislation, “We [the Democrats] just lost the South for a generation.” In time, Republicans would begin winning Senate and House seats in the South that had long been held by Democrats. As the Republican Party “Southernized,” it became more conservative, and the number of liberal and moderate Republicans from the Northeast and Midwest began to decline as well. In June 1996, when Bob Dole was succeeded by Trent Lott as Senate majority leader, Lott noted proudly that for the first time the Senate and House had Republican leaders from the South, the culmination of the party’s transformation that had begun with Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As David Broder, the preeminent political columnist of the era, observed, “The transfer of the Republican party from the Midwest and Northeast to the South is the single most important transformation in the GOP’s 20th century history.”16
By the 1990s, these forces had taken their toll on the Senate and its operation. Few Republican moderates remained in the Senate, and those who did found it to be a more partisan, less congenial place. New Republican senators who had served in the House of Representatives brought with them hard-edged, right-wing credentials earned in the service of the “Gingrich revolution.” The political scientist Sean Theriault has identified “Gingrich senators” such as Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, and Phil Gramm of Texas, former representatives who had been part of Newt Gingrich’s takeover of the House, as a principal cause of partisan warfare.17 His allies and his adversaries would agree that Gingrich changed American politics dramatically; he saw politics as war and conducted it accordingly.
Ironically, Lott, whose anguish about the current condition of the Senate is deep and genuine, contributed significantly to accelerating its decline. Most newly elected senators came to the Senate with a sense of deep respect, if not awe. Lott was an exception. As he described in his candid memoir Herding Cats, he hated the Senate from the time he arrived in 1989. “After giving up real power in the House and winning a score of victories for Ronald Reagan,” Lott wrote, “I expected a warm welcome in the Senate.” Instead, Lott and the other freshmen “found themselves in ‘storage’ as the Senate machinery creaked to life.” Lott viewed many of his fellow senators as “distant, impossible to befriend.” The Senate itself was “a confused and disorganized institution” with chaotic and unpredictable hours. Along with “a tight clique of conservative young senators,” Lott set out to change the institution to be more structured and more partisan as he rose in the Republican leadership. When he became Republican leader in 1996, Lott showed his preference for working closely with Gingrich and the House Republicans, rather than looking to collaborate across the aisle with the Senate Democrats or with the moderates in his own party.18
The reaction to Lott’s ascendancy was strong and immediate. In 1996, at a time of peace and prosperity in America, a record number of senators—fourteen—chose to retire. The departing group included some of the Senate’s most respected members, who were known for their ability to make deals on a bipartisan basis, such as the Democrats Sam Nunn, Bill Bradley, and Howell Heflin, and the Republicans Alan Simpson, Nancy Kassebaum, and William Cohen. The Senate had been involved in bruising fights over NAFTA and health care, but those were par for the course. This time, a common thread in their farewell speeches was a deep dismay about the Senate and the condition and direction of American politics.19
Jim Exon, a Democrat who had served more than a quarter century as Nebraska’s governor and senator, put it plainly in terms that the other senators could identify with:
Our political process must be “re-civilized.” What I have called the ever-increasing, vicious polarization of the electorate, the “us against them” mentality, has all but swept away the former preponderance of reasonable discussion of the pros and cons of many legitimate issues. Unfortunately, the traditional art of workable compromise for the ultimate good of the nation, heretofore the essence of democracy, is demonstrably eroded.
Exon focused on a phenomenon increasingly described as “the permanent campaign”: “Much to the detriment of our nation, the political season no longer ends on Election Day. In fact, lately, it never ends. The late level of each campaign not only feeds the next campaign; it distorts the once respected legislative procedures that get trapped in the brief intervals between campaigns.”
William Cohen expressed puzzlement about the national mood in 1996, especially when compared to the era when he had begun his service in Congress, two decades earlier:
Regrettably, contempt for government seems even more dangerous today. . . . Unlike the mid-70’s, the cause of today’s anger and resentment is less apparent. The country is at peace, employment is high, and inflation is low. We have preserved our original constitutional freedoms and, indeed, even enlarged them, particularly in the field of civil rights. We are a nation more prosperous, better educated, and have at our fingertips and disposal more information than at any time in the history of humankind. Yet there is a wave of unease and negativity surging through the society, a debasement of both language and conduct that threatens to shred the fabric that binds us together as a nation. . . . Congress is an institution designed to permit ideas and interests to compete passionately for public approbation and support. It was never intended to be a rose garden where intellectual felicities could be exchanged with polite gentility. . . . But enmity in recent times has become so intense that some members of Congress have resorted to shoving matches in hallways. . . . [If] we permit the art of compromise to be viewed as abject surrender, then we should not lament that our system has become sclerotic or dysfunctional.
Still, even as late as 1999, the Senate could sometimes function as intended. When the House of Representatives impeached President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about his sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, it fell to the Senate to conduct the second impeachment trial of a president in American history, and the first since 1868. The Senate was in uncharted waters, writing the rules for a trial in the television age. There were many fraught moments, but Senate leaders Trent Lott and Tom Daschle, who had forged a close relationship, succeeded in keeping the hundred senators involved, on track, and committed to a fair process. When the three-week trial concluded with Clinton’s acquittal, there was a widely shared view that the Senate could take pride in how it had handled its historic responsibility.20
Two years later, the horrific terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon once again brought America, and the Senate, to a moment of national unity and shared purpose. It proved to be, literally, a moment. The 2002 elections were contested on a fiercely partisan basis, as the Republicans improved their position in Congress by smearing Democrats as lacking in patriotism. The Republicans defeated Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, who had lost an arm and both legs to a grenade in Vietnam, with television ads linking him to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, questioning his commitment to the nation’s security. By 2004, relations were further poisoned when the new Republican majority leader, Bill Frist, took the unprecedented step of traveling to South Dakota to campaign against Daschle’s reelection. Daschle lost narrowly, and one more Senate tradition that had contributed to comity was a thing of the past.21
In 2005, after the reelection of President George W. Bush, the Senate descended further into partisan conflict. A bitter clash arose when the Democrats filibustered ten of Bush’s judicial nominees. Frist threatened to initiate a process to change the Senate rules to abolish the filibuster for judicial nominations, which had become known, in a phrase coined by Lott, as the “nuclear option.” A bipartisan “Gang of Fourteen” defused the issue by agreeing that judicial nominations would not be filibustered, except in “extraordinary circumstances,” which were left undefined. Cooler heads had prevailed, but the Senate’s continued deterioration was painfully obvious. “A profound sense of crisis now surrounds the Senate and its members,” wrote the historian Lewis Gould.22
In retrospect, the Senate had a clear chance to chart a more bipartisan course around this time. In 2005, Nevada senator Harry Reid became minority leader; after the Democrats regained the majority in the 2006 midterm elections, Reid became majority leader, and Mitch McConnell stepped up to be minority leader after the retirement of Bill Frist. Together, Reid and McConnell would lead the Senate for the next decade—longer than any other pair of Senate leaders in history.
There were reasons for cautious optimism. Reid and McConnell were both twenty-year veteran senators who had risen through the ranks to be leaders and presumably loved the Senate. Each man had overcome personal adversity: Reid had grown up in terrible poverty, and McConnell had beaten childhood polio. They were both hard workers, tough fighters, dedicated politicians fiercely protective of their state’s special interests, and good tacticians. Neither man would ever demonstrate the substantive knowledge, broad-ranging intellect, and constant personal growth that characterized Mansfield, Byrd, and Baker, but they should have been well suited to a serious discussion of what was needed to put the struggling Senate on a better course.
In their first Congress working together, Reid and McConnell did come through for America in one moment of absolute crisis. In September 2008, the Bush administration confronted the sudden, devastating financial shock triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis and the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke went to the Capitol on a Friday evening to meet with the congressional leadership. “Let me say this again,” Bernanke said grimly. “If we don’t act now, we won’t have an economy on Monday.”23
McConnell and Reid grasped the urgency of the situation and rolled up their sleeves to provide immediate, strong support for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). When the feckless House Republicans shockingly rejected the legislation, causing the stock market to plunge 770 points, McConnell went to the Senate floor and reassured the nation that the Senate would meet its responsibilities. The Senate voted overwhelmingly for the TARP legislation, and the chastened House soon followed suit. McConnell rightfully expressed pride in what the Senate had done and in his own role. It was a reminder of what the Senate could do for the country.24
Optimists might have believed that this cooperation augured well for the future, but things did not work out that way.