John Thune and the Senate’s Age of Irrelevance

To everyone’s surprise, however, the new Trump Administration has made the filibuster almost beside the point. Instead of trying to bulldoze the Senate, Trump has simply driven around it. He has sought to govern by fiat, through executive orders, brazenly ignoring federal spending statutes and daring courts to try to stop him. Several Republican senators told me they worried that Congress—paralyzed by decades of partisan gridlock—had already ceded too much of its power to the executive branch. As Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency swings its chainsaw through congressionally mandated federal spending, Trump is now threatening to push the legislature from ineffectiveness to obsolescence.

In the mid-March interview, Thune acknowledged that, “right now, there’s a tension” between the Senate and the executive branch. He said several times that the Trump Administration was “testing limits”—including through “stuff that DOGE is doing.” Yet Thune insisted that “the Senate has a unique role in our democracy, and our job is to defend that role, and at times, if necessary, to push back.” DOGE’s handiwork “will get litigated,” he predicted, and, “at the end of the day, the structure works, and, I think, the institutions stay standing.” Thune, in other words, was counting on the judicial branch to protect the legislative branch.

Saxby Chambliss, a former Republican senator from Georgia and a friend of Thune’s who talks to him often, told me that Thune is ready for “adversarial conversations” with Trump, and that he will “be as tough as he needs to be.” Joe Manchin, the Democratic-turned-Independent former senator from West Virginia and another close friend of Thune’s, agreed. He said that, with MAGA loyalists now dominating the House of Representatives, and the Democrats flailing at one another over their own impotence, Thune was “the keeper of the seal.” It would be up to Thune alone to “convince the White House that we have three equal and independent branches of government.”

In a city aptly described as Hollywood for ugly people, Thune could pass for an actual movie star, with pale-blue eyes, a square jaw, and Mt. Rushmore cheekbones. Now sixty-four, he has salt-and-pepper hair that is still thick enough to part neatly on the side, and the broad shoulders, thick arms, and narrow waist of a basketball player. His morning workouts at the Senate gym are legendary. Until a recent knee injury, Thune held the informal title of the fastest man in Congress. (He has likened that honor to “the best surfer in Kansas.”) The phrases “looks the part” and “central casting” come up in nearly every conversation about him. John McCain, a two-time Presidential contender, used to joke that he would have won the White House had he looked like Thune. The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who liked to respond that McCain’s wife, Cindy, “would be happier, too,” told me that Thune “is a guy you really want to hate—so tall, good-looking, beautiful wife—but you can’t, because he is so genuinely nice.” Some journalists who cover the Capitol have given Thune the nickname Hot Grandpa.

Thune’s physicality played a role in the chance encounter that started his political career. He grew up in the tiny town of Murdo, South Dakota, the fourth of five children. His father, a decorated Navy vet who’d been a star basketball player for the University of Minnesota, taught and coached at the town high school, where Thune’s mother was a librarian. High-school sports were virtually the only entertainment in town. Bruce Venard, a friend of Thune’s whose family owns an auto-repair shop there, told me, “In those days, if you wanted to be somebody, you showed it on the basketball court, on the football field, on the track.” Thune was a standout in all three sports. In one high-school basketball game, he sank five of six free throws. Later, at a store, he ran into Jim Abdnor, a Republican congressman from a nearby town who often turned up to cheer for high-school sports teams. “I noticed you missed one,” Abdnor teased him. Thune’s parents were Democrats. But Thune became Abdnor’s protégé.

In 1980, the year Ronald Reagan first won the Presidency, Abdnor took George McGovern’s Senate seat. Thune, who’d graduated from high school the previous year and followed his older brothers to Biola University, an evangelical school near L.A., volunteered for the campaign. After earning a business degree at the University of South Dakota, in 1984, he joined Abdnor’s Senate office as a legislative aide focussed on tax policy. (Abdnor, who never married, hired a series of young men from South Dakota, forming a kind of surrogate family. Some lived with him in his apartment near Washington, working as a combination of driver and aide. They called themselves the Li’l Abdnors.)

Abdnor lost his seat to Tom Daschle in 1986, and Thune followed his mentor to the Small Business Administration. Adbnor’s connections then set Thune up for a series of political jobs back home, including state railroad director and executive director of the South Dakota Republican Party. He was elected to the House at the age of thirty-five and ran for the Senate six years later, in 2002, against the Democratic incumbent, Tim Johnson.

In retrospect, the parallels to the 2020 Presidential campaign are uncanny. Thune led by more than three thousand votes on Election Night, but by morning the tables had turned. Late returns showed an unusually high turnout on a large Oglala Sioux reservation. Thune lost the race by just five hundred and twenty-four votes. South Dakota is sometimes called the Mississippi of the North because of pervasive racism toward its Native American minority. Operatives and donors urged Thune to demand a recount, reasoning that, even if the effort failed, allegations of reservation ballot stuffing would galvanize the Party’s base—much as President Trump’s allegations of voter fraud in predominantly Black cities energized his core supporters in 2020. But Abdnor, who was serving as an adviser to the Senate campaign, had always preached a more high-minded politics, and Thune decided to concede. Lee Schoenbeck, a former Li’l Abdnor who volunteered on the Senate campaign, told me that supporters “went out and made affidavits and did all the things that happened in 2020, and John just said, ‘No, I am not doing it.’ ”

Several Li’l Abdnors, who keep in touch with one another, told me that most of them disdained Trump’s incivility and lawlessness. Schoenbeck said, “The attack on America’s Capitol is something I don’t think Jim Abdnor could ever have gotten over, and that is all I am going to say about it.”

Two years after losing the 2002 Senate race, Thune challenged and beat Daschle, then the Democratic leader. In his victory speech, Thune addressed Abdnor: “Jim . . . we got your seat back!”

Thune arrived in Congress at a time that now looks like a high point of its power and effectiveness. In the nineties, lawmakers debated issues, committees drafted bills, and the parties compromised to tackle urgent problems. Congress sent Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton major legislation on trade, crime, environmental protection, financial regulation, civil rights, and other issues. Negotiations between the parties even closed the deficit, briefly. Philip Wallach, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the author of a timely book, “Why Congress,” told me that, looking back, “it’s really amazing—nothing like that has happened in the last fifteen years.”

Wallach argues that the Founders intended Congress to defuse the kind of polarization currently vexing our politics. In the Federalist Papers, James Madison worried about what he called “the violence of faction”—he feared that rival parties would put their own interests ahead of the common good, that a party in the majority would tyrannize the minority, and that an all-or-nothing battle for the upper hand would tear apart the Republic. Presidential elections could provide no remedy, because they are winner-take-all contests; the same is generally true of court verdicts. Congress is the sole branch of the U.S. government in which opposing factions can broker mutually acceptable solutions. In the Senate, especially, a tradition of unlimited debate—the origins of the filibuster rule—all but forced compromise by blocking a simple majority from taking action on its own. The necessity of power sharing also meant that Congress could provide a check against despotism even if the same party held the Presidency and a majority in both houses.

One turning point, Wallach told me, was Newt Gingrich’s Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, in 1994. Gingrich relished partisan warfare, demanded loyalty from his rank and file, and turned district elections into contests between the national parties. Political scientists have identified long-standing trends that have contributed to the deepening polarization of Congress, including the growing ideological homogeneity of each party and the breakdown of the media into echo chambers. But Wallach is surely correct that Congress, the branch of government designed to mediate factional conflicts, has succumbed to them—and even made them worse.

To more effectively wage partisan battles, Democratic and Republican leaders in both chambers consolidated their own power. Instead of relying on committees to draft bills, party leaders increasingly negotiated significant measures behind closed doors, then brought them to the floor for up-or-down votes—often in the form of giant “must-pass” bills against a tight deadline, such as measures to keep funding the government. In the Senate, the concentration of power has been especially stark. Senators used to take pride in proposing amendments during floor debates, facilitating bipartisan dealmaking even against party leaders’ wishes. Yet those leaders now often block individual senators from such freelancing by allowing consideration of only a limited number of amendments and then filling those slots with innocuous proposals of their own choosing—a tactic called “filling the tree.” The former Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid pioneered this strategy in the two-thousands, and his successors from both parties have kept it up ever since.

In the Congress of 1991-92, Wallach noted, the Senate adopted more than sixteen hundred amendments. In 2023-24, that number fell to two hundred. And the last Congress passed just two hundred and seventy-four bills—down from about seven hundred a year during the late eighties and fewer than any Congress since before the Civil War. Of those two hundred and seventy-four bills, the ten longest were assembled by the party leaders, and they accounted for four-fifths of all the pages of legislation passed in that Congress.

Lawmakers sometimes grouse about their loss of power. Ten years ago, Mark Begich, then a Democratic senator from Alaska, tried, unsuccessfully, to instigate a revolt against Reid’s tree-filling. Lamar Alexander, another critic of the practice, told me that being elected to the chamber now resembled “joining the Grand Ole Opry and not being allowed to sing—it’s very disappointing.” Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, complained to me that “what used to be an integral part of legislating—offering amendments, changing bills on the floor—has largely disappeared. Bills are drafted privately by the leaders of both parties, and ninety-eight other senators acquiesce to allowing two leaders to arrogate that power to themselves!” He continued, “Mitch McConnell ruled the conference as a monarch. He made the decisions, and he shared his thinking with no one.”

Thune is in some ways a throwback. At a time when cable-news coverage and online donations reward the noisiest partisans, he has built a reputation for quietly working in good faith with Democrats on the committees he has sat on, among them Agriculture and Commerce. Chris Lewis, the chief executive of Public Knowledge, a left-leaning advocacy group, told me that Thune opposed its positions on most issues, but called him “a straight shooter” who looked for “common ground” on such issues as rural broadband access. Several senators told me that, at the end of last year, Thune negotiated an agreement with Democratic leaders that allowed Biden to equal the number of judicial confirmations made during the first Trump Administration. In exchange, the Democrats agreed to drop a handful of liberal appellate nominees whom Republicans found especially objectionable, leaving those seats open. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who participates in a weekly Bible study with Thune, told me that “he was fundamental to all the bipartisan work we did in the last cycle.” For example, Thune helped initiate talks on an immigration bill, even letting legislators use his office. In the end, the bill became a classic example of partisan paralysis: when Trump indicated that he preferred to leave the border problems unaddressed, so that he could keep campaigning on the issue, the Republicans killed the legislation.