SOUTH BEND — On Dec. 19, Joe Donnelly, then the senior U.S. senator from Indiana, cast what he thought would be his last congressional vote — joining his Senate colleagues to pass a $1.3 billion funding bill that would have avoided a federal government shutdown until at least February.

Before the vote, Donnelly had packed the remnants of his office into a U-Haul truck. He hopped behind the wheel at 5:30 a.m. the next day and started driving home. He was at the Ohio-Indiana state line when he heard rumblings that President Donald Trump had soured on the funding bill. Conservative pundits were criticizing Trump for backing down on his demand for money to pay for a border wall with Mexico.

Donnelly had just made it home and fixed himself a ham and cheese sandwich when the Democratic leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer, called. Trump refused to sign the bill. Donnelly would have to catch a flight back to Washington for more votes as Congress tried to strike a deal with the White House.

To Donnelly, who spent his 12 years in the House and Senate walking a narrow line between his party and red-state voters before his defeat to Republican Mike Braun in November, the fight over the government shutdown was the latest example of increasing political dysfunction.

“What it represented to me is that decisions were being made by Rush Limbaugh,” Donnelly said, “as opposed to the senators of the United States of America, who had agreed 100 to nothing, together with the president and the vice president, that this made commonsense policy.”

Donnelly reflected on his congressional career and the state of national politics in an interview with The Tribune on Sunday, during a “welcome home” open house in his honor at Fiddler’s Hearth pub in downtown South Bend.

Among the highlights of Donnelly’s career, he said, were “having the chance to see every American be able to get health care,” through the Affordable Care Act, and seeing the U.S. economy rebound from the Great Recession. He also noted the “right-to-try” law signed by Trump last year, giving terminally ill people greater access to experimental medicine, and the Jacob Sexton Military Suicide Prevention Act.

“I look in the mirror sometimes and say, gosh, here I am, a grandson of immigrants, the first in my family to even go to college, and to have a chance to serve in the House and the Senate — boy, that exceeded any dream I could ever have,” he said.

The former senator’s balancing act on divisive issues such as abortion and immigration sometimes meant he pleased neither liberal factions of his base nor the more conservative Indiana voters he had to woo. Nevertheless, he said Sunday, he remains proud of his bipartisan record. He still points out that the Lugar Center named him the fourth-most bipartisan senator to have served since 1993.

In the interview, Donnelly named hyper-partisanship as the biggest problem in Washington, while he said the best thing about the nation’s capital was that “so many of the people there care so much,” including staffers who would sometimes spend time at night and on weekends trying to coordinate services for homeless veterans back in Indiana.

Last week, the University of Notre Dame announced Donnelly would be teaching two courses this semester, one on political science and another at the Keough School of Global Affairs. Donnelly earned undergraduate and law degrees at Notre Dame.

Aside from teaching at Notre Dame, Donnelly would not specify any other possible next steps. He said he would like to find public service opportunities related to veterans, focused on health care and homelessness. But he demurred when asked whether that work could lead him back to Washington.

“Right now that would be hopefully right here in our state,” he said.

On Sunday afternoon, while TV screens displayed photos of Donnelly walking in parades and locking arms with former President Barack Obama, the pub was packed with well-wishers, including the local Democratic Party chairman and many of the party’s candidates for mayor of South Bend.

In brief remarks to his supporters, Donnelly recounted trips to Iraq to see American soldiers and town hall meetings with voters in the summer of 2009, leading up to the passage of Obama’s health care law.

“We did it for a state we love, and friends we love,” Donnelly said in closing, before adding an aside: “And I am not running for mayor.”