“I asked reporters about that,” he said. “And they responded, ‘it passed unanimously, it must have been easy.’ That was seven years of my life.”

“They’re not looking for what gets done,” he said. “They’re looking for good fights they can report on, that people get excited over. We can come out of a meeting where we’ve just accomplished something, and they don’t want to know what we’ve just accomplished — they want to know what this person has just said about that person which, in my opinion, is starting a fight because they couldn’t find one. That’s not journalism. Getting the word out on what’s being done is journalism. People might not be as excited about that.”

Most recently, Enzi has placed most of his focus on addressing the national deficit and the nation’s looming fiscal crises. Earlier in the week, Enzi gave an impassioned speech on the Senate floor warning of the imminent insolvency of the nation’s Social Security and Medicare programs. As chairman of the budget committee, Enzi has been central to conversations around that issue in recent years, and has worked several pieces of legislation intended to address it, including a five-year plan he announced earlier this spring intended to fight the national debt.