The Daily - 'The Interview': 3 Senators Who Quit on Why Congress Won’t Stand Up to Trump

Episode Date: December 13, 2025

The current and former lawmakers get candid about bipartisan politics, party leadership and the state of the Senate.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail] our show on YouTube: youtube.com/@TheInterviewPodcastFor transcripts and more, visit: nytimes.com/theinterview Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

From the New York Times, this is the interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. Since the founding of our democracy, there's been a separation of powers. The Senate, in particular, was created to act as a stabilizing force with its own important responsibilities. But after almost a year of the second Trump presidency, during which time he's pursued an aggressive agenda, the Senate is arguably weaker than ever, with some critics and senators saying it is abandoning its role in checking presidential power.

So today, I'm having a different kind of conversation than we usually do on the show, a roundtable about the state of the Senate with three lawmakers who all decided to leave it. Jeff Flake, a Republican, represented Arizona and left office in 2019, warning that the influence of Trumpism on the GOP would be corrosive to his party.

We must never regard as normal, the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. Joe Manchin represented West Virginia, first as a Democrat who frequently voted with Republicans, and later as a registered independent. He left the Senate at the start of this year. I was not elected to take a side.

I was elected to represent all sides. And Tina Smith is a Democrat who currently represents Minnesota. and earlier this year announced that she won't be seeking re-election in 2026. After 20 years of hard and rewarding work in the public sector, I'm ready to spend more time with my family. I wanted to gather these three to get their read on the state of the Senate and our politics and democracy more broadly.

So here's my conversation with Senators, Flake, Mansion, and Smith. I want to think. Thank you all for being here. It is a great pleasure to have you here on this sort of gray winter day in Washington, D.C. You are all three former or soon-to-be former senators, and you all left at different periods of the last 10 years. And I'm hoping, frankly, that because you are leaving or have left, you will feel a little bit more unleashed in being able to discuss your true feelings and thoughts. That's what we left. So I want to start by asking you all to give me a word or sentence, something brief, that describes the state you think the Senate is in right now.

And I want to start with you, Senator Smith, because you are actually sitting in said body. Broken. Senator Flake? Probably a retreat. You know, in this system, presidency just by virtue of the system gains more power over time. But what's been frustrating is to see the Senate just willingly give up Article 1 authority. Abdication. They've abdicated basically responsibilities of what their purpose of being there.

The Senate is the most unusual body in the world. Our framers designed it to be that way, and it was ingrained in me. The filibuster is the only thing. It's the holy grail of keeping us talking and working and becoming friends. Jeff being on the Republican side, Tina and I at the time on the Democrat side, but we were all friends because we wanted to get things done. And we knew the Senate was a place to do it. And they've abdicated that type of responsibilities.

I mean, those are all pretty bleak words, I think. You want to call them cowards? What you want to say, Lou? I want you to say what you think. Pretty straightforward responses here, it seems. That's good. Yeah, those are pretty straightforward responses and not terribly optimistic. Senator Flake, when you left the Senate, you had been serving in Congress for 18 years, first as a representative, in a speech you gave on the floor, you gave this warning, and I'm going to quote here, 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? Yes, most definitely. I'm not saying that we're under an authoritarian system now. We're not. But that tendency, and certainly Congress has abdicated its responsibility on a number of areas, whether it's war powers, whether it's tariffs, issues that rightly belong in the Senate. And senators have typically, over time, jealously guarded their prerogative, but they have willingly kind of given that up. And you have a president who is eager to take just about everything he can get. Now, every president, Republican and Democrat, will push some limits somewhere in terms of, of executive orders. This president is doing that in spades, obviously. But that's why you need a Senate willing to stand up. And we've seen inklings lately that you might see some of that coming.

But boy, it's been long and coming. And I was concerned then. I'm more concerned today. Senator mentioned just before you left the Senate, you turned away from the Democrats. You registered as an independent. And in some of your final words, you called the Democratic brand toxic. Have you seen anything lately that has changed your mind on the direction of the Democratic Party? Well, first of all, my state's in our 40 state. There's not a redder state in mine. And it got to the point where the people in West Virginia, when you have a total working class people coming from the lower echelon of the financial run, okay, hardworking, poorer people. Why did they all leave the Democrat Party? It's kind of left them behind.

And really, if you want to know, the underlying motive was that a lot of these people would tell me, They said, Joe, listen, the Washington Democratic Party basically has spent more effort, resources in time for able-bodied, capable people that should be working that don't work or won't work than those of us who do, and I've had enough. I can't go home and explain what we're doing as far as a Democratic Party. So people that are still Democrats in my state, I just says, you better make sure they understand you're an independent West Virginia Democrat. Because if you get tagged as a Washington Democrat, you're underwater 15, 20 points before you start.

I mean, that's a warning to the party, for sure. Well, I try to be as nice as I can, try to be as truthful as I can, because in some states, some blue and really blue areas, they still can survive and still have a strong, you know, New York City, in different places like that, maybe still strong. But I can tell you, if you want to know why you'll never be in the majority again, because you're losing most of the working rural areas. And that is what has happened. All right, Senator Smith, I'm going to turn to you because you've said 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. That is the classic line. Come on, tell us it true.

When I say I want to spend more time with my family, I actually mean it because I really like my family. Sure. But I've also said a few other things about why I'm leaving. Yeah, whenever you leave a job, it can be for personal reasons, but there's always. professional reasons. I noted that Representative Jared Golden, who is also stepping down from the House, he talked about political nastiness and the political violence that we're seeing for reasons that he's not seeking re-election. So I'm just wondering, are those issues weighing on you, too? You know, I made the decision not to run for re-election in December, January of

24, 2025. And then everything that has happened this year has certainly not made me wonder whether I made the right decision. I mean, I had, you know, this horrible political assassination of my dear friend, Melissa Hortman, the Speaker of the Emerita of the Minnesota House. We had the shooting of the Annunciation School, which is literally 10 blocks from where I live. And so the reality of these political attacks. And of course, 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, you know, there was another part of it for me, which is that I'm going to, I'm, what is my 68, roughly? I will be 68 next year.

Pretty young for a Democratic senator. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. She's on a low end of the spectrum right there. I am not burdened by the belief that I am the only one who can do this job. I feel really confident in the bench that is there in Minnesota to carry on, and I'm actually quite invigorated by making space for those leaders to step in. When I left, I never said I want to spend more time with family. I love my family, but I would have liked to have served another term. I mean, you don't get all the way to the most exclusive club in the world and just want to stay one term.

So I would have liked to, but the price for doing so would have been, yeah, it would have been for me to say, you know, those principles I said I believed in, I no longer do. And that, the cost, the price for that was too steep to back now. Those of us who've been in these tough races before, when you're facing something, you know what is going to turn you into a different animal than you're not. It's not, I know you and I know team. That's not who we are, I don't think. But we had to turn into another animal if we want to. to go on. I've never faced an election where I thought the other side was in me. I learned from every election I was in a debate, and after the election was over, I won most of them. So I'd call the person. I said, you know, you have some good ideas in that debate. I said, can we talk about that and start building relationships? That's gone. I'll say that's not in vogue now, but I don't think it's gone. I think it's gone either. And I haven't given up hope on that, Joe. I believe that it's still, that it's still there. I never give up, but I'm just dealing with reality today.

The thing that I see, Jeff, and you can talk about this, you came from the House. I came from being a governor, which is the most collegial of all institutions. You can go to a governor's National Governor's Association. If I didn't know that that person was a Republican, you could not tell the difference. We're all working for the same, curing the same problems. The House, you all operate on simple majority, 218, okay? Don't even have to acknowledge the other side. Don't even have to let them be involved if you don't want to, okay?

I kept noticing more and more congresspeople that kept coming to the Senate with that mindset made it harder for the Senate to stay collegiate. Oh, definitely. Am I right? Yes, completely. I mean, the real turn in the House came 2005, 6. I got there in 2001 when we didn't adopt formally, but basically lived by the so-called Hastert rule.

And it wasn't Hastered. It was really Tom DeLay and a few others who basically 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, but that you should be able to pass it just with Republican votes. And if it might gather bipartisan support, then, you know, knock some provisions off so it won't be attractive. And then you use that as a cudgel during the next election.

And that, you know, you had people kind of mature as politicians, I guess, under that system. And some of them have gone to the same. I mean, this is what Mitch McConnell said. Like, my purpose is to beat Obama. And gradually, the partisanship just ramped up. You know, it's funny listening to you all. And it's one of the reasons I wanted to bring you here because you have the long view of how we got here. And clearly, all of this predates the era that we're in now. But this era has supercharged all of what you're discussing. And you've touched on one of the main critiques of the the Senate right now. And it's something I heard when I sat with Senator Lisa Murkowski,

which is that the Senate is now, regardless of the partisan nature, it's just not doing its job. It's not acting as a check on the executive. And I would love for you to just discuss, do you think that this is an enduring shift away from congressional power? 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 side. And you see some who will try to, you know, replicate what President Trump has done in terms of amassing power and it's kind of 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. They know that the Senate, you know,

has the reputation of being the world's most deliberative body, and they'd like to get back to deliberating. So I do think that this isn't a condition that that has to stay. But we've never seen a time when presidential powers have been given back. The president, as I was saying before. And we're seeing the Supreme Court ruling on this and making it law essentially. Yeah, but the president is amassed far more power and is using far more power than the Supreme Court has granted him now. But it's not been codified. And yeah. Not yet. Yeah. I think it's, you know, my sense of it is, that 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. We're 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, I mean, they're gushing out of the Capitol. I mean, and it's not just the Senate. I mean, what the speaker did to keep the U.S. House of Representatives out of session for how many days was it? You know, seven weeks was really an incredible abdication of responsibility and authority. So it's interesting to me because I'm always so fascinated by the interpersonal relationships of everybody in the Senate. And the people that I see that seem to feel the most betrayed right now are my Democratic colleagues who stake their careers on working across party lines. to accomplish thing. They were part of the gangs. They were in the, you know, 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 just basically kowtowed to the president, not only on the, you know, on the fact of basically allowing him to undo our budget bills. But, I mean, on the ways that they have kind of confirmed against their better judgment, I would have.

argue some of these really terrible nominees like RFK Jr. and like the Secretary of Defense. So part of the problem, I believe, is where I think Joe and I differ. Maybe I differ from both of my colleagues here. I think that the Senate rules have so completely stymied the ability of the Senate to do anything. And I'm not just talking about the filibuster. I think there's got to be a way of figuring out how to make the systems of the Senate work better. Because you'd like to get rid of the filibuster. I mean, I would at least like to reform it so that if you're, you're a way of you're going to filibuster a bill, you ought to at least have to stand on the damn floor and talk. And we're exactly alike on that. Instead of just saying, oh, I don't like this, so I'm going to, I'm going to object and then, you know, go out for dinner.

Every president who has a majority is going to want to get rid of the filibuster. And every Senate ought to resist that. Totally resisted. Republican or Democrat, because it is one of the few mechanisms left that forces people to work together. I've watched the Senate for the last eight years. And I have not seen. that the filibuster is the pill to cure partisanship. What I see is that partisanship is, I mean, sometimes, certainly the need to find a 60-vote majority creates strong pieces of legislation like the Infrastructure and Jobs Act. But 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. For example, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, isn't popular with the Democratic base. And 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? And is the leadership of the respective parties part of what's going on here? Well, so in a functioning legislative body, you would think that the Democratic leader and the Republican leader would talk to each other all the time, right, to try to figure things out, try to get things going. The level of partisanship in the Senate is at such a degree that that it just doesn't happen anymore. The 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. to run in what states. It has been primarily about that kind of like how the elections of the work of the DSCC has been working. When I spoke to Senator Schumer, he touted that as his greatest sort of strength that he really can choose candidates that win. And so, you know, you get a governor Janet Mills running in Maine at 77 against Graham Platner, who's 41 and more progressive. And so, you know, that sets up an intra-party fight. Yes, I think it does. To be clear, I haven't endorsed anybody.

in Maine, but I haven't endorsed anybody in Minnesota yet either because I think that it should be up to the voters to decide. I'm endorsing Susan Collins in Maine. Okay. Yeah. They get rid of a Susan Collins, then you're really losing the Senate. People that have that mindset, we can't even get them to run anymore, good people in the middle. If you look in the Senate, and you mentioned Chuck Schumer, and some people look at them and say

they're too partisan to get anything done, they won't ever reach across the aisle. Well, they have in the past. I was part of the gang of eight with Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin. Yes, 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 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, but the incentives are so misaligned right now. I'm wondering what you think of Republican leader John Thune

who broadly people view him as being less obsequious to Trump, right? That he's not exactly like Speaker of the House Johnson, according to critics who really takes everything that he's doing from the White House. That said, he has been accused of sort of chipping away at the filibuster by allowing a number of simple majority votes, ushering in what the New Yorker called the age of Senate irrelevance. So, Senator Flake, I mean, why do you think he's so weak?

Is he so weak? Well, when I mentioned before that there are still a core of Republican senators who want the Senate to be like it used to be, a deliberative body, and not have the president control that, he's one of them. And he's an institutionalist. But when John Thune said the other day, when the president said, get rid of the filibuster, John Thune's response was, we don't have votes, which is true, I would have liked him to say, that's a terrible idea, Mr. President, we're not going to do it. So, yeah, from the outside, I certainly am frustrated sometimes when they won't just say, you know, what they're going to do are on tariffs, actually pull your power back there and certainly get ahead of the Supreme Court. You don't want to see, you know, you're weak enough for the president. You don't want to be weak and follow what the Supreme Court does or have them fight your battles for you. So, yeah, I'm frustrated sometimes, but I do think that he's certainly a senator that is in some ways. often doing the best he can, given the political situation, to get the Senate back. And I think under- pulling his power back, though. Why, I mean, he is the Senate Majority Leader. Why isn't he doing it?

Well, his caucus, I guess he has to look at his caucus. Yeah, and you get angry tweets every day if you do. From the president, you mean. Yes, oh, definitely. And so that's difficult, you know, and up to now, the president has been able to, in any Republican seat in the country, say, 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 now. I've come to the conclusion. There's two things that will change that would change politics in America. First, as far as in Congress would be term limits. 10, 15 years ago, I would have never been supportive of term limits. Okay. And I was at a rally one time. I was governor. I had a big town hall rally. A little lady got in the back and she says, boy, Joe, she says, we wish you were for term limits. And I said, her name was Susie. I said, Susie, I said, I understand where you're coming from. I said, but you're going to lose a lot of the institutional knowledge you have and the power in this, on and on, all these good people. She said, think of this, Joe. If we had term limits, maybe we get one good, courageous term out of you. Maybe you'd be willing to do the right

thing, at least one good term from you. She sold me. I couldn't, I didn't have any argument back. I said, fine. And I've been for it ever since. And open primaries. And I'll give you an example of open primaries. Our friend Lisa Murkowski would not get elected through the primary process in Alaska if it wasn't for the ranked choice voting or open primaries. When you can control a primary and that's what gives President Trump or it 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 or this or that.

An open primary, boom, you know, you're out there. The best will succeed. 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. Well, here, you're a perfect example of that because your type of primaries in Arizona or what? Yeah, if we had the Alaska style thing, I would have run for re-election. After the break, we talk about why Congress has so much trouble fixing the things voters care about most. We often kind of get sucked into this sort of, is this, you know, are you moderate, are you progressive?

Like, where do you fall in the continuum? I actually 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 was pretty much working or whether you think that it needs to be fundamentally changed. Let me give you the counterpoint to this dream of bipartisanship, which is did we get here perhaps because the Senate's been ineffective at responding to the real problems that voters have because it's incremental. They're just not any big swings anymore.

I mean, people at the moment seem to be clamoring for these ideas that can solve their very real problems. Does incrementalism, which can read as bipartisanship, actually get the job done at a moment like this? I think that this is exactly the issue. If you look at Americans over the last, probably, what, 20, 30 years, significant majorities of Americans have said that they think that things are terribly on the wrong track, that they're working as hard as they possibly can and nothing is

really changing. And so, like, if you have a governing body that isn't capable, hasn't been capable of making the big changes that need to be made, of course people are going to be frustrated. And what I think is so interesting, because we often kind of get sucked into this sort of, is this, you know, are you moderate, are you progressive? Like, where do you fall in the continuum? I actually 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 pretty much working, whether 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 being progressive. It's actually like 75% issues, paid family and medical leave, child care that people can afford, raise the minimum wage. I mean, even Medicare for all. which was seen as being incredibly radical, a majority of Americans want to see a complete revamping of our health care system. So all of that argues to me that we need a body, a Senate and a Congress,

that's capable of making those kinds of big changes. Well, I make the case for incrementalism. Being a conservative means preserving conservative or institutions that work. And the Senate has worked over time. And so incrementalism is what you want. That's why I like the filibuster. for example, because it helps, it doesn't cure it completely, but it helps from having wide swings of, you know, popular opinion back and forth like you have in the house.

And that has served the country well. So I don't think that that's the problem. I think I look at Joe Manchin was always in the middle of every bipartisan fight, every bill that looked for bipartisan support saying, hey, compromise. as a coin of the realm here, because you don't want to have these wide swings. You know, there used to be an old saying, you're guilt by association. If someone was a bad actor and you were working or talking to them, they think, well, 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. That is so ridiculous to me that I never did subscribe. And the Democrats chastised me for working across. I mean, there's this perception that those people who are fortunate enough, a closely divided Senate to wield a lot of power because they... I don't recommend that on anybody. I do not recommend it. But if it happens, be ready.

Fair. But they sit in this position and they are obstructing, I'm giving you the counterargument, obstructing actual progress. I mean, you've seen James Carville, the longtime Democratic strategist, who is self-described as a centrist, obviously worked for Bill Clinton. And he recently argued that, for example, Democrats need to run on and presumably eventually legislate on, and I'm going to quote her, a sweeping, aggressive, unvarnished, unapologetic, and altogether unmistakable platform

of pure economic rage. When I read what James Carvel said, I was thinking about how, you know, my view of it is that for the last 10 years, I think the Democratic Party, the National Democratic Party has been kind of stuck in a, it's like we're stuck in a bad relationship. We've so defined ourselves by being opposed to Trump that. we have not, 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 that is about where we think the country ought to go. And I think we need to break up with this old relationship that we have, and we need to be

much more bold about what it is that we're proposing. And I think that's what Carville is getting at. What I hear, economic rage, you know, that kind of suggests that it's this very leftist far left platform Mondami kind of thing. That's what it speaks to me. And I hope the Democrats don't do that because we need two strong parties and we don't. And they would be responding to that subset of a subset of a subset of voters that votes 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, would force the Republicans back into that more centrist mode as well. I mean, that's the other side of this coin. You know, you certainly can't accuse the Trump administration of moving incrementally. I mean, should the Democrats be emulating what the Trump administration's doing? Because Republicans are really taking the ball and running with it. Well, I'm super interesting question, right? Because, I mean, what Trump is doing is he is seizing, you know, massive amounts of power to do, let's just take, for example, his policy around what to do about people who are, you know, inside the country, maybe without documents, maybe illegally, maybe they are here legally. And so he's doing something very radical when it

comes to his immigration policy. The last time I saw, that's dramatically unpopular. People do not like it. Yes, of course, people want to see secure borders. They do not want people who are criminals. They don't want dangerous products to come into, they don't want drugs to come into our country. But it is highly unpopular. So I think that the thing that's missing is, in your question, what I'm responding to is we ought to be able to meet the needs of Americans and what they want. And that's not been happening. Well, I don't disagree with your, you know, the immigration overreach. I think it is significantly. Talk about going after criminals.

Everybody wants that. But he's gone far beyond that. Every president coming in exaggerates the mandate that they were given. And they're usually given a whoop in the midterm elections coming up, almost always. This time it'll be significant, I think. And so you'll have now a period of divided government, which I, as a fiscal conservative, concerned about debt and whatever else, am looking forward to. Divided government is generally more fiscally prudent government, but it also...

And maybe inspires that collaboration and compromises needed. Precisely because no president thinks that they can get it all. They may be able to get all what they think they're going to get for a couple of years, but then the pendulum swings. And we're seeing that swing in a big way. And I wrote a piece the other day called The Great Migration Has Begone, GOP migration. We're seeing it on a few things, Marjorie Taylor Green, a few outliers. There's cracks in the facade, right?

There are. There are. But now when people realize that it's, you know, it's a few things. It's popular now to be against the president on a couple of issues, and they will need to, in order to survive some of these generals coming up, you'll see a different attitude coming up. The Democrats have lost registered Democrats. And what happened in immigration, this immigration push and how tough he got on immigration is the greatest cover he could ever ask for. Because he says, did you like what you had? That's what you'll get.

And we've got, and the Democrats could have said, listen, we made a mistake. We made a mistake on the border. We want to work with the president, but we want him to work with us on legal immigration. I don't want to get too much on a tangent on immigration, but immigration, you're right, has been an enormous failure of Congress. I mean, there has not been immigration reform for a very long time, and that has allowed both parties, actually, in different ways to make it into an issue that they campaign on, they use to sway people. Obama used it with the DACA issue, and we're seeing President Trump use it as well. But 2013, what happened in 2013? John Boehner, you need to talk to John Boehner, why it didn't go on the floor.

This is the issue. There's always a reason why it doesn't go on the floor, and there's always a reason why it doesn't get resolved. But that is the actual question here, again, coming back to this idea of when things have really moved in the Senate, it's because a party has said, we are 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 for us. Or am I wrong about that? You could make the alternate argument, which I would make with Obamacare. That swung too far.

And if you look at the next election, I mean, Democrats got clocked, took the shalacking that President Obama famously said because I think that was moving too far. They shouldn't have tried to just push it through even with 60. They should have got a few Republican votes and had a better product in the end. So I don't know that that's a good argument. Well, so it's interesting because now today, the Affordable Care Act is one of the, like, I mean, it's very popular. People like it, and I strongly support it.

But there's an element here of accountability. Democrats pass it with a bear, you know, with 60. And then you could argue if you didn't agree with that legislation, we got held accountable. accountable because people saw what we did and they told us what they thought. A lot of times I think that the filibuster and the rules of the Senate broadly mask that accountability because you can advocate for something, but you never actually get it done. And then you're never really held accountable for what you're advocating for. And as a result, nothing ever really changes. But what happens is you have these passionate arguments on Fox News and MSNBC about what you really wanted to do if only the other. side had let you. It, I mean, it really is sort of astonishing that we're still having this discussion. You did so many years after it passed. No one wants to fix it. They just want to talk about and defend it. I mean, 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. And, but it never really got at the core underlying problem, which is that health care costs too much in this country. And there's, you know, take those Senator Flick's point that it would have been better legislation if they would have waited some more and talked to Republicans? Or do you think nothing would have happened at all? Well, I mean, it's so hard for me to know because I wasn't there in the moment. And I always am of the mind you try to figure out what is the best possible thing that you can do. And if you can do and trying to do that in a bipartisan way is always, I think, the right approach if you can put it together. But, you know, 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 about how much power the Senate has right now, because as you've discussed, they've ceded control over tariffs, but also over foreign affairs. I mean, there's uproar over the double tap strike on a boat allegedly carrying drugs. And we've seen, a group of democratic lawmakers send a video message to the military urging them to ignore illegal orders. There are Marines, there are Navy ships

in the Caribbean now. I mean, do you feel like the Senate's response to the very real questions about what we're doing in and around Venezuela is sufficient? And why isn't there more oversight? Why isn't there more questioning of something, again,

that was a core purview of the Senate? Yeah, that's been the frustrating thing. Yeah, I do think that this double-tap strike, the second strike, particularly if that video is released, I mean, there will be revulsion, I think, on most Americans part. Sure, they want a strong response on drugs, but you can have that with some kind of humanity as well, and this wasn't it. And so I do think that that's coming, but 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. Bottom line is, is that Pete Heggseth, I think someone needs to ask him, your commander-in-chief, the president said he wanted to, he'd like people to see the second, the rest of the video. do you not take that seriously or you're not obeying the commander-in-chiefs? Would you like to see the senators do more from both parties? Sure, they have to do more, both parties.

The senators have to do their job. There's not another body can fix this. The house is not going to fix it. Okay, forget about that. It's the Senate can fix it. The Senate can write the ship, and it can if it does its job. And they have to come to the grips

that are they waiting for another election to see what's going to happen in the midterms or is it so serious right now, we just need to do something. and 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 and we'll see if that happens. You miss it?

Not at all. And the reason I don't miss it is from the standpoint I could tell that I could get more done on the outside and I can on the inside. I've been there for a long time in the Senate for almost 15 years, tried everything humanly possible to make those changes. So I think I can maybe give a little voice to that from this side better than I could from the inside.

Now, I miss some things. I missed the people. Oh, yeah, we missed that. Oh, yeah. And I, like I said, I didn't want to leave. I wanted to stay another. I didn't get defeated, but I knew that in order to win re-election, I would have to change who I was and say things that I didn't believe.

So what's an unvarnished truth that you weren't able to say that and that you could say now? Well, I can say that most of my former colleagues don't agree with the policies they're pursuing on tariffs and foreign policy in this. Venezuela stuff. They don't. That's correct. The political incentives are not aligned with them to speak truth to power here. That's the bottom line. Like I said, I think that's shifting. But as of now, you know, re-election is a strong poll. I want to thank you so much for your time. This has been really enlightening. I really appreciate it. Thank you all again. Thank you, Lila. Manchin and Tina Smith.

To watch this interview and many others, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube.com slash AtSymbol the interview podcast. This conversation was produced by Seth Kelly. It was edited by Annabelle Bacon mixing by Sonia Errero. Original music by Dan Powell, Alicia Be Itoop, and Marion Lozano. Photography by Philip Montgomery. The rest of the team is Priya Matthew, Wyatt Orm, Paola Newdorf, Andrew Carpinski, Eddie Costas, and Brookman.

Our executive producer is Alison Benedict. Next week, David talks with Palestinian lawyer and writer Raja Shahade. I used to be able to speak to the settlers or to the army in the West Bank and have a conversation with them and ask them, why are they doing this and so on? And now it's impossible. I'm Lulu Garcia-Davaro, and this is The Interview from The New York Times. Thank you.