Lulu Garcia Navarro

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?

And I think under his power back, though, why?

I mean, he is the Senate majority leader.

Why isn't he doing it?

After the break, we talk about why Congress has so much trouble fixing the things voters care about most.

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.

There's 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 mean, there's this perception that those people who are fortunate enough in a closely divided Senate to wield a lot of power because they— I don't recommend that on anybody.

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.

Mm hmm.