‘It’s Completely Unappealing’: Why the Senate Is Broken

1 week ago 10

Michelle Cottle

Aug. 4, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET

The dome of the U.S. Capitol, reflected in a puddle.
Credit...Mark Peterson for The New York Times

Michelle Cottle

It has been a rough summer for the Senate. The Republicans’ push to pass President 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’s 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 shit done,” said Tina Smith, the Minnesota Democrat who announced in February she would not seek re-election 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, Republican of Alaska, told The Times’s 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 already above average for an election cycle, including some younger members (by Senate standards) who have announced their retirement, such as Ms. Smith; Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat; and Thom Tillis, a Republican who decided to pack it in after clashing with Mr. Trump. Two senators have announced they are pursuing the more appealing gig of governor — Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, and Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado — and others are considering following suit.

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Tina SmithCredit...Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

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Thom TillisCredit...Eric Lee for The New York Times

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Lisa MurkowskiCredit...Mark Peterson for The New York Times

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Michael BennetCredit...Mark Peterson for The New York Times

Even the majority party has had recruiting trouble. Two popular Republican governors, Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, who left office last January, and Brian Kemp of Georgia, resisted serious pressure to run for the Senate. “It’s completely unappealing,” Mr. 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. Frustration erupts, such as when Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, accused members of his party last Tuesday of being “complicit” with Mr. Trump, sparking a loud sniping match on the floor with two fellow Democrats. All of which is making the body less appealing to members and voters alike.

But a healthy legislative branch is too vital to abandon. All the more so with an aspiring authoritarian in the White House. 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 of them 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,” said Ms. Smith. “I believe there will be a tipping point, and I think that we’re actually pretty close to it.”

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,” said Mr. Bennet.

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,” Mr. 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 fund-raising, 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,” recalled Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, 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,” Ms. Smith said.

In his Senate days, Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, appeared in a reality TV series, “Rival Survival,” in which he and Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, were stranded together on a desert island for six days. When I asked Mr. 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, Mr. Flake is serious about the need for opportunities for senators to relate as real people. He said that 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, Democrat of Delaware, fleeing charging elephants in Mozambique.

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 Mr. Trump — is the filibuster, which enables even just one senator 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 Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, who lost re-election 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,” said Mr. Merkley.

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.

“There’s no discussion. There’s no debate. There’s no going to the floor getting different perspectives,” said Mr. Tester.

“We basically traded the ability to offer amendments for what’s thought of as the security of not having to vote on amendments that we don’t want to vote on, said Mr. Bennet. The chamber’s leaders have “consolidated their power in ways that were unimaginable 10 or 15 years ago.”

Senators acknowledge that part of the reason for leaders’ tight grip is to try to prevent the chamber from spiraling into partisan chaos, with people pushing votes on all kinds of messy issues and blocking one another’s amendments out of spite.

To make obstructionism at least a bit harder, Mr. Toomey suggested changing the unanimous consent rule that allows a lone senator to block an amendment from consideration.

While the rules can be tinkered with, the situation more basically calls for “a reawakening among individual members about how the process used to work,” said Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, adding that members need to start reclaiming power from their leaders. “Because we haven’t been doing it that way, our muscle memory doesn’t accommodate it as well as it should.”

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,” said Mr. Flake.

“If you’re a rock thrower, that behavior gets rewarded far more than being a problem solver,” agreed Mr. Peters. “It’s about a base that is very energized, on both sides,” he said. “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 a majority of 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,” said Mr. Bennet, “but I don’t think that’s where the American people want us to go.”

Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle

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Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle

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