The United States Senate is at a precarious moment. From tariffs to agency funding to foreign affairs, the Senate’s check on the executive branch is arguably weaker than ever, with some critics, and some senators, warning that the body is abandoning its constitutionally prescribed role. (Congress is also incredibly unpopular: A recent Gallup poll showed its approval rating at a dreadful 15 percent.)
With that in mind, I wanted to have a different sort of conversation than we usually do on The Interview: a round table about the state of the Senate, and how we got here, with three lawmakers who decided to leave the body at different points in the Trump era.
Jeff Flake is a Republican who represented Arizona for 18 years, initially in the House and then in the Senate, before announcing that he would not seek re-election in 2018 because of President Trump’s influence on the Republican Party. Joe Manchin represented West Virginia, first as a Democrat — one who drove other Democrats crazy by frequently voting with Republicans — and later as a registered independent. He decided not to run for re-election and left the Senate at the start of the year. And Tina Smith is a Democrat who represents Minnesota and announced this year that she won’t be seeking re-election in 2026. I gathered them in Washington to get their read on the state of the Senate and of our politics and democracy more broadly. I told them that I hoped, because they are out of or nearly out of office, that they would feel free to be candid, to which Manchin replied, “That’s why we left!”
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I want to start by asking you all to give me a word or a sentence that describes the state you think the Senate is in right now.
Tina Smith: Broken.
Jeff Flake: Retreat. The presidency, just by virtue of the system, gains more power over time. But what has been frustrating is to see the Senate just willingly give up Article I authority.
Joe Manchin: Abdication. They’ve abdicated their responsibilities. The Senate is the most unusual body in the world. Our framers designed it to be that way, and it was ingrained in me that the filibuster is the holy grail, keeping us talking and working and becoming friends. They’ve abdicated that type of responsibility.
Those are all pretty bleak words.
Manchin: You want us to call them cowards?
I want you to say what you think. Senator Flake, when you left the Senate, you had been serving in Congress for 18 years. In a speech you gave on the floor, you gave this warning: “Let us recognize, as authoritarianism reasserts itself in country after country, that we are by no means immune.” Do you think you were right to be concerned?
Flake: Definitely. I’m not saying that we’re under an authoritarian system now. We’re not. But certainly Congress has abdicated its responsibility on a number of areas, whether it’s war powers, tariffs, issues that rightly belong in the Senate. Senators have typically jealously guarded their prerogative, but they have willingly given that up, and you have a president who is eager to take just about everything he can get. Now, every president, Republican or Democrat, will push some limit somewhere in terms of executive orders. This president is doing that in spades, obviously. That’s why you need a Senate willing to stand up.
Senator Smith, you’ve said that you’re stepping down to spend more time with family and that it has nothing to do with politics. A lot of politicians who leave say that.
Manchin: Come on, tell us the truth!
Smith: [Laughs] I actually mean it, because I really like my family. But I’ve also said a few other things about why I’m leaving.
Representative Jared Golden of Maine, who is stepping down from the House, talked about the political nastiness and the political violence as reasons that he’s not seeking re-election. Are those issues weighing on you too?
Smith: Everything that has happened this year has certainly not made me wonder whether I made the right decision. This horrible political assassination of my dear friend Melissa Hortman, the speaker emeritus of the Minnesota House. We had the shooting at the Annunciation school, which is literally 10 blocks from where I live. And so the reality of these political attacks, and in this moment fueled by the president of the United States, who just a couple of weeks ago said that two of my colleagues and four members of the House of Representatives should be tried for treason and executed — of course these things all have impact. But there was another part of it for me, which is that I will be 68 next year.
Pretty young for a Democratic senator!
Smith: [Laughs] Yes, it is. And I am not burdened by the belief that I am the only one who can do this job.
Flake: When I left, I never said I wanted to spend more time with my family. I love my family, but I would have liked to have served another term. You don’t get all the way to the most exclusive club in the world and just want to stay one term. But the price for doing so would have been for me to say, “Those principles I said I believed in — I no longer do.” And that price was too steep to pay.
Manchin: Jeff, those of us who’ve been in these tough races before, when you’re facing something that you know is going to turn you into a different animal — that’s not who we are. But we’d have had to turn into another animal if we wanted to go on. I never faced an election where I thought the other side was the enemy. I learned from every election. If I was in a debate, after the election was over — I won most of them — I’d call the person, and I’d say: “You had some good ideas in that debate. Can we talk about that?” And start building relationships. That’s gone.
Flake: It’s not in vogue now, but I don’t think it’s gone.
Smith: I don’t think it’s gone either. I haven’t given up hope on that, Joe.
Manchin: I never give up. I’m just dealing with reality today. The thing that I saw, and Jeff, you can talk about this because you came from the House: I came from being a governor, which is the most collegial of all institutions. You could go to a governor’s [convention]. If I didn’t know that the person was a Republican or a Democrat, you could not tell the difference. We were all curing the same problems. But the House, you all operate on a simple majority. You don’t even have to acknowledge the other side. Don’t even have to let them be involved if you don’t want to. And I kept noticing more and more congresspeople that kept coming to the Senate with that mind-set made it harder for the Senate to stay collegial. Am I right?
Flake: Oh, definitely. The real turn in the House came in 2005. I got there in 2001, when we didn’t adopt formally but basically lived by the so-called Hastert rule. It wasn’t Hastert; it was really Tom DeLay and a few others, who said if you’re going to bring something to the floor as a Republican — and we had a bigger cushion at that time in the majority — that you should be able to pass it just with Republican votes. And if it might gather bipartisan votes, then knock some provisions off so it won’t be attractive and then use that as a cudgel during the next election. You had people mature as politicians under that system, and some of them have gone to the Senate.
One reason I wanted to bring you here is because you have the long view, and clearly all of this predates the era that we’re in now. But this era has supercharged what you’re discussing. And you’ve touched on one of the main critiques of the Senate right now. It’s something I heard when I sat with Senator Lisa Murkowski earlier this year, which is that the Senate, regardless of the partisan nature, is just not doing its job. It’s not acting as a check on the executive. Do you think that this is an enduring shift away from congressional power?
Flake: I don’t think it’s an enduring condition. I think it has to do with leadership. I look at the potential field on the Democratic and Republican sides, and you see some who will try to replicate what President Trump has done in terms of amassing power and stiffing the House and the Senate. But the vast majority of Republican senators who I’m most familiar with don’t like this at all. They want to reassert their prerogatives.
Smith: I completely agree with Jeff that behind the scenes you will hear many Republicans in the Senate say: “I don’t like this. I don’t think this is right.” But then they also say, “We’re just waiting for the right moment to actually do something about it.” And meanwhile, the powers of the Senate and the powers of the legislative branch are gushing out of the Capitol. I’m always so fascinated by the interpersonal relationships of everybody in the Senate. And the people that seem to feel the most betrayed right now are my Democratic colleagues who stake their careers on working across party lines to accomplish things. They were part of the gangs — so much of the work that you did, Joe, around the infrastructure act — and they feel as if the bonds of trust between Democrats and Republicans have been so broken because of the ways in which Republicans in the Senate have kowtowed to the president, not only allowing him to undo our budget bills, but on the ways that they have confirmed — against their better judgment, I would argue — some of these really terrible nominees like R.F.K. Jr. and the secretary of defense. Part of the problem, and I believe this is where I differ from both of my colleagues here, is that the Senate rules have so completely stymied the ability of the Senate to do anything.
You’d like to get rid of the filibuster?
Smith: I would at least like to reform it so that if you’re going to filibuster a bill you ought to at least have to stand on the damn floor and talk, instead of just saying, “Oh, I don’t like this, so I’m going to object and then go out for dinner.”
Manchin: We’re exactly alike on that.
Flake: Every president who has a majority is going to want to get rid of the filibuster. And every Senate ought to resist that, Republican or Democrat, because it is one of the few mechanisms left that forces people to work together.
Smith: I’ve watched the Senate for the last eight years, and I have not seen that the filibuster is the pill to cure partisanship. Sometimes it creates the very systems that make it very difficult for the things that Americans want to get done to actually get done.
I want to come back to this, but before we do, I am curious about the problem of party leadership. Senator Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, isn’t popular with the Democratic base. Senator Smith, you are part of a so-called fight club that is looking to get new leadership. Can you explain what you think is needed?
Smith: In a functioning legislative body, you would think that the Democratic leader and the Republican leader would talk to each other all the time, to try to figure things out, to try to get things going. It just doesn’t happen anymore. But this informal group that I am a part of is a group of senators who have been complaining and unhappy primarily with the ways in which the leader has been identifying what candidates he wants to run in what states.
Which is interesting, because when I spoke to Senator Schumer, he touted that as his greatest strength, that he really can choose candidates that win. And so you get a Gov. Janet Mills running for Senate in Maine at 77 years old against Graham Platner, who’s 41 and more progressive, and that sets up an intraparty fight.
Smith: Yes, it does. To be clear, I haven’t endorsed anybody in Maine —
Manchin: I’m endorsing Susan Collins in Maine. They get rid of a Susan Collins, then you’re really losing the Senate. People that have that mind-set, we can’t even get them to run anymore.
Flake: You mentioned Chuck Schumer. I was part of a gang of eight with Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin on immigration. We passed a bill, 68 to 32. That was one of the last examples we’ve seen of the Senate working how it used to work. My point is that some of the same characters that we now look at and say, “They could never do this” — they can. And they have in the past.
I’m wondering what you think of the Republican leader, John Thune, who people broadly view as being less obsequious to Trump than the House speaker, Mike Johnson, who, according to critics, really takes everything that he’s doing from the White House. That said, Thune has been accused of chipping away at the filibuster by allowing a number of simple-majority votes, ushering in what The New Yorker called the Senate’s “Age of Irrelevance.” Senator Flake, why do you think he’s so weak? Is he so weak?
Flake: When I mentioned before that there are Republican senators who want the Senate to be like it used to be, he’s one of them. He’s an institutionalist. But when the other day the president said, “Get rid of the filibuster,” John Thune’s response was, “We don’t have the votes,” which is true. But I would have liked him to say: “That’s a terrible idea, Mr. President. We’re not going to do it.” Or on tariffs, actually pull your power back. Get ahead of the Supreme Court. You don’t want to have them fight your battles for you. So yeah, I am frustrated sometimes. But I do think that he’s often doing the best he can given the political situation.
Why isn’t he pulling his power back, though? He is the Senate majority leader.
Manchin: His caucus.
Flake: Yeah, and you get angry tweets every day if you do.
From the president, you mean?
Flake: Yes, definitely. The president has been able to say, in any Republican seat in the country, “I can get a primary opponent for you if you don’t do what I say.” That’s a powerful political incentive. We may like it to be different, but that’s the incentive structure that most of my former colleagues are working under. They don’t like it, but they’re in it.
Manchin: I’ve come to the conclusion there’s two things that would change politics in America: [congressional] term limits and open primaries. Our friend Lisa Murkowski would not get elected through the primary process in Alaska if it wasn’t for the open primary. When you can control the primary, that’s what gives President Trump, or gives a Democrat president, the power in a real blue state or a red state, knowing that they have that power to name who they want or primary you. An open primary — boom. The best will succeed, and he can’t target you.
Flake: If you had five or six states with open-primary laws like Alaska has, that would create a whole different power structure in the Senate.
Let me give you the counterpoint to this dream of bipartisanship, which is: Did we get here because the Senate has been ineffective at responding to the real problems that voters have because, essentially, it has been incremental? There are just not any big swings anymore. People at the moment seem to be clamoring for ideas that can solve their very real problems. Does incrementalism, which can be read as bipartisanship, actually get the job done?
Smith: This is exactly the issue. Significant majorities of Americans have said that they think things are terribly on the wrong track, that they’re working as hard as they possibly can and nothing is really changing. And so if you have a governing body that hasn’t been capable of making the big changes that need to be made, of course people are going to be frustrated. We often get sucked into this [question]: Are you moderate or are you progressive? I don’t think that’s the right continuum at all. I think it’s a question of whether you actually think that the status quo is working, or do you think that it needs to be fundamentally changed? And Americans are telling us that the status quo is not working for them. And they’re telling us that things that maybe would be seen as progressive — paid family and medical leave, child care that people can afford, raise the minimum wage, even Medicare for All, which was seen as being incredibly radical, a majority of Americans want to a see a complete revamping of our health care system. So all of that argues to me that we need a Senate and a Congress that’s capable of making those big changes.
Flake: I’ll make the case for incrementalism. Being a conservative means preserving institutions that work, and the Senate has worked over time, so incrementalism is what you want. That’s why I like the filibuster, for example, because it helps from having wide swings of popular opinion back and forth like you have in the House. The Senate is all about incrementalism, and that has served the country well. So I don’t think that’s the problem. Look at Joe Manchin. He was always in the middle of every bipartisan fight, every bill that looked for bipartisan support, saying, “Hey, compromise is the coin of the realm here,” because you don’t want to have these wide swings.
Manchin: There used to be an old saying, “Guilt by association.” If someone was a bad actor and you were working with them, [people thought] you must support that. Now it’s guilt by conversation. You can’t even be seen having a conversation with someone who might not be on the same side. That is so ridiculous to me. The Democrats chastised me for working across the aisle.
There’s this perception that people who are fortunate enough in a closely divided Senate to wield a lot of power —
Manchin: I don’t recommend that to anybody. But if it happens, be ready.
Fair. But I’m giving you the counterargument that they are obstructing actual progress. James Carville, the longtime Democratic strategist who is a self-described centrist, recently argued that Democrats need to run on, and presumably eventually legislate on, “a sweeping, aggressive, unvarnished, unapologetic and altogether unmistakable platform of pure economic rage.”
Smith: When I read what James Carville said, I was thinking about how, for the last 10 years, the national Democratic Party has been stuck in a bad relationship. We’ve so defined ourselves by being opposed to Trump that it’s like we’ve forgotten how to do the other part of our job, which is to put forward an aggressive, strong, positive vision of where the country ought to go.
Flake: When I hear “economic rage,” that suggests a very leftist platform, a Mamdani kind of thing, and I hope the Democrats don’t do that. They would be responding to that subset of a subset of a subset of voters in Democratic primaries, just like too many Republicans respond to that subset on the right. But it doesn’t do much for the country, and it allows the Republicans to be more extreme than they could otherwise be. I think if the Democrats would be more centrist, it would force the Republicans back into that more centrist mode as well.
That’s the other side of this coin. You certainly can’t accuse the Trump administration of moving incrementally. Should the Democrats be emulating what the Trump administration’s doing? Because Republicans are really taking the ball and running with it.
Smith: Super interesting question. What Trump is doing is seizing massive amounts of power. Let’s just take for example his policy around what to do about people who are inside the country without documents, maybe illegally, maybe they are here legally. He is doing something very radical when it comes to his immigration policy. It’s dramatically unpopular. People do not like it. So the thing that’s missing in your question that I’m responding to is that we ought to be able to meet the needs of Americans and what they want. And that’s not been happening.
Flake: I don’t disagree with you about immigration overreach. Talk about going after criminals — everybody wants that. But he has gone far beyond that. Every president coming in exaggerates the mandate that they were given. And they’re usually given a whooping in the midterm elections. This time it’ll be significant, I think. And so you’ll now have a period of divided government, which, as a fiscal conservative concerned about debt, I am looking forward to. The pendulum swings, and we’re seeing that swing in a big way on a few things. I wrote a piece the other day called “The Great G.O.P. Migration Has Begun.” Marjorie Taylor Greene —
Smith: There’s cracks in the facade.
Flake: There are. When people realize that it’s popular now to be against the president on a couple of issues and in order to survive some of these general [elections] coming up, you’ll see a different attitude.
But coming back to this idea of when things have really moved in the Senate, it’s because a party has said, “We’re going to put all of our power behind this issue, whether it be Obamacare or something else, and we’re going to make this a priority.”
Flake: You could make the alternate argument with Obamacare, which is that it swung too far. And if you look at the next election, Democrats got clocked. They shouldn’t have tried to just push it through, even with 60 votes. They should have gotten a few Republican votes and had a better product in the end.
I find it astonishing that we’re still having this discussion so many years after it passed.
Manchin: Well, no one wants to fix it. They just want to talk about and defend it.
Smith: The Affordable Care Act was basically a piece of pretty important insurance reform. It changed the rules around how insurance companies could provide insurance and what they had to do, but it never really got at the core underlying problem, which is that health care costs too much in this country.
Do you take Senator Flake’s point that it would have been better legislation if they would have waited and talked to Republicans, or do you think nothing would have happened at all?
Smith: It’s so hard for me to know, because I wasn’t there in the moment. Trying to do [things] in a bipartisan way is always the right approach, if you can. But how long do you have to wait before you can get to the bipartisan agreement? If you see something that you think is really going to be good, I think you have to do it.
I want to end with this question of how much power the Senate has right now. It has ceded control over tariffs, as we’ve discussed, but also over foreign affairs. There’s an uproar over the double-tap strike on a Venezuelan boat allegedly carrying drugs. There are Navy ships in the Caribbean now. Do you feel like the Senate’s response to the questions about what we’re doing in and around Venezuela is sufficient? Why isn’t there more questioning over something that, again, was a core purview of the Senate?
Flake: That has been the frustrating thing. I do think that this double-tap strike, particularly if that video is released — there will be revulsion on most Americans’ part. Sure, they want a strong response on drugs, but you can have that with some humanity as well. It has been frustrating because in all areas of foreign policy, whether it’s tariffs, whether it’s war powers, whether it’s support for Ukraine — there’s a bill in the Senate now with 85 co-sponsors that the Senate could, if it wanted to assert itself, pass that veto-proof bill. And there are sufficient votes in the House too. But they just haven’t, because they’re afraid of what the president can do to them.
Manchin: Someone needs to ask Pete Hegseth: “Your commander in chief, the president, said he’d like people to see the video. How do you not take that seriously?” [Trump has since changed his position on this.]
Would you like to see the senators do more, from both parties?
Manchin: They have to do more. The senators have to do their job. There’s not another body that can fix this. The House is not going to fix it. The Senate can right the ship. Are they waiting for another election to see what’s going to happen in the midterms, or is it so serious right now that [they think], We just need to do something? I’m praying to God that we can put the politics aside and reach across for the sake of the country and do the right thing. We’ll see if that happens.
Do you miss it?
Manchin: Not at all. And the reason I don’t miss it is I could tell that I could get more done on the outside than I can on the inside. I’d been in the Senate for almost 15 years. Tried everything humanly possible to make those changes.
So what’s an unvarnished truth that you weren’t able to say then that you could say now?
Flake: Well, I can say that most of my former colleagues don’t agree with the policies they’re pursuing on tariffs and foreign policy and this Venezuela stuff. The political incentives are not aligned for them to speak truth to power here. That’s the bottom line. Like I said, I think that’s shifting, but as of now, re-election is a strong pull.
This interview has been edited and condensed. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, or Amazon Music
Lulu Garcia-Navarro is a writer and co-host of The Interview, a series focused on interviewing the world’s most fascinating people.
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