Jeff Flake

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 has to stay.

But we've never seen a time when presidential powers have been given back.

Yeah, but the president has amassed far more power and is using far more power than the Supreme Court has granted him now.

It's not been codified.

Not yet.

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.

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.

The immigration war.

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.

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.