Lindsey Graham described to the Times how McConnell exhorted his caucus after the disastrous 2008 election: “He said if we didn’t stick together on big things, we wouldn’t be relevant.” Last December, the Republicans decided to filibuster a military-spending bill in order to delay the looming vote on health care until as close to Christmas as possible. Thad Cochran, the Republican ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, promised Daniel Inouye, the chairman, that he wouldn’t join the effort. But at the last minute Cochran, who has been in the Senate since 1979 and brings disproportionate amounts of defense money to Mississippi, told Reid that his leadership wouldn’t allow him to vote with the Democrats and end the filibuster—even on a matter of national security. (The Democrats were able to impose cloture, and the vote on health care finally took place on Christmas Eve.)

Republican defections have been rare. In early 2009, Collins and Olympia Snowe, also of Maine, voted for the stimulus bill, along with Arlen Specter (who promptly switched parties). Snowe also voted for the Finance Committee’s health-care-reform bill last October, the only Republican to do so. But in December, at the pivotal moment, she voted against the version that went before the full Senate. “I wasn’t interested in expanding this program beyond the Finance Committee version—it grew by a thousand pages,” Snowe said. She wasn’t included in the negotiations with White House officials that took place in an elegant conference room across from Reid’s suite of offices, and said that the Democrats “did not accept any of my proposals. As I said to the President, it was all windup and no pitch.” McConnell was able to exploit her alienation. A friend of Snowe cited another reason for her reversal: “She actually said to me once that she had never felt the pressure that she felt on health care, never before had that pressure been quite as evident to her or quite as real or troubling. Kyl and McConnell were saying things like ‘You just can’t let us down, we’re all in this together. You’re a senior Republican member of this caucus, and you just have to hang tough with us. We expect it and you’re going to do it.’ ”

Reid doesn’t use such tough tactics; he has achieved his position, in spite of his public shortcomings, by being the senator who helped other Democrats, always answered their calls, and got them what they wanted through masterly maneuvering. This has made him enormously popular within the Democratic caucus, but it doesn’t give him the leverage of McConnell, let alone of Lyndon Johnson.

In the current Senate, it has become normal for a handful of senators, sometimes representing just ten or twenty per cent of the country’s population, to hold everything up. And the status quo has become sufficiently frustrating that a few new senators have considered a radical option: mutiny.

Tom Udall, who is sixty-two, is older than most freshman senators. He has the crow’s-feet of a Westerner who has spent time in the sun, and a slow, good-natured voice. His father, Stewart, was an Arizona congressman and the Interior Secretary for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson; his uncle Mo was a legendary Arizona representative; his cousin Mark is a freshman senator from Colorado. Udall served five terms in the House before winning a Senate seat from New Mexico, in 2008. And yet he has the air of a political Candide—he is always earnest, capable of disappointment but not cynicism. “I ran on the idea that the Senate should not be a graveyard for good ideas,” he said. “Then to be on the inside—the thing that strikes you is how one senator can hold up the whole show.”

In his first year in office, Udall decided to do something audacious: he would try to change the Senate’s rules. Customarily, the rules continue session after session, and a provision in Rule XXII requires sixty-seven votes to amend them, making it extremely difficult. (“Rule XXII is a Catch-22,” Ted Kennedy used to joke.) Udall embraced a different idea—the “constitutional option.” Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution states that “each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings” at the beginning of the new Congress. So, in theory, a senator could take the floor next January and propose debating its rules from scratch, including the filibuster. New rules could be passed with a simple majority. There’s even a precedent for this: moves to revisit the rules by invoking the constitutional option have been made three times, most recently in 1975. Udall has spent much of the past year trying to build support for the idea.

At the request of Udall and others, Schumer, who is the chairman of the Rules Committee, has held a series of hearings on the filibuster, calling witnesses such as Sarah Binder, the historian, and Walter Mondale, who was in the Senate when the constitutional option was invoked in 1975. Dick Durbin, the second-highest-ranking Democrat, has organized working groups among newer members on other internal reforms, such as ending secret holds and choosing committee chairs by caucus vote rather than by seniority. (Lamar Alexander wryly suggested to me that Schumer and Durbin were competing for the favor of newer members, in case Harry Reid loses his seat in the fall and they run against each other for Majority Leader.)

For Republican institutionalists, such as Alexander and Gregg, the push for rules reform is folly. “If you want a parliamentary form of government, go over to the House,” Gregg, who is about to retire, scoffed. “Why even run for the Senate?” Udall’s plan for next January, he said, would be a “gigantic mistake.”

“They’ll get over it,” Alexander said of the Democrats’ enthusiasm for rules reform. “And they’ll get over it quicker if they’re in the minority next January. Because they’ll instantly see the value of slowing the Senate down to consider whatever they have to say.” He added that the Senate “may be getting done about as much as the American people want done.” The President’s ambitious agenda, after all, has upset a lot of voters, across the political spectrum. None of the Republicans I spoke to agreed with the contention that the Senate is “broken.” Alexander claimed that he and other Republicans were exercising the moderating, thoughtful influence on legislation that the founders wanted in the Senate. “The Senate wasn’t created to be efficient,” he argued. “It was created to be inefficient.” At one of the filibuster hearings, in April, Alexander, sitting across the table from Udall, said that, for all the times the Democrats charge the Republicans with obstructing legislation, “we could say that’s the number of times the majority has tried to cut off our right to debate, our right to offer amendments, which is the essence of the Senate.”

Newcomers like Udall seem to think that the Senate has grown so absurd and extreme that some kind of reform is inevitable. Perhaps they need more time to plumb the depths of the institution’s intransigence. According to Sarah Binder, a change in rules is extremely unlikely; Republicans would be implacably opposed to, say, weakening the filibuster, and so would some Democrats, especially long-serving ones. “I would oppose that,” Chris Dodd said, adding of the freshmen, “These are people who have never been in the minority.” For older Democrats, who have put in their years, grown adept at working the rules, and now chair powerful committees, the reform impulse could be a threat. (Among senior senators, the sole enthusiast for rules reform is Tom Harkin.) One senator spoke of the Senate as being divided not between whales and minnows but, rather, between bulls and calves. The older Democrats are too accustomed to the Senate’s ways to share the frustrations of the newcomers; the handful of older moderate Republicans are too weak to challenge the newer radicals who now dominate the caucus.

Even if the freshmen Democrats can somehow reform the filibuster next January, the Senate will remain a sclerotic, wasteful, unhappy body. The deepest source of its problems is not rules and precedents but, rather, its human beings, who have created a culture where Tocqueville’s “lofty thoughts” and “generous impulses” have no place.

A few days after passing health-care reform, the Senate struggled to its feet to take on a second large task. Financial regulatory reform should have been the easiest piece of major legislation of the Obama Presidency, the likeliest to win real bipartisan support. The financial crisis had been catastrophic for millions of Americans, and after the 2008 bailout Wall Street had become even more hated than the Senate was. In April, a lineup of bankers from Goldman Sachs appeared before Senator Levin’s subcommittee on investigations, and managed to appear as arrogant, callous, and evasive as their reputations had suggested. The public demanded action. Some Republicans had a genuine desire to pass a bill. If health-care reform had been a war of attrition, financial reform was a promising liaison.

The affair began with a Republican, Bob Corker, and a Democrat, Mark Warner—both multimillionaires serving their first term, both considered centrists. Corker is a small, dapper former construction magnate who became the mayor of Chattanooga; Warner is a tall, preppily dressed former telecommunications entrepreneur who became the governor of Virginia. Chris Dodd, the Banking Committee chairman, assigned them to work together on the section of the bill having to do with the liquidation of troubled firms—making sure that there would never be another taxpayer bailout. They worked through the winter, in Warner’s office, in Corker’s office, over dinner, sometimes without staff, as if they were members of a Senate from the past. They hosted a series of afternoon seminars, inviting guests such as Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, and Sheila Bair. Corker and Warner were sometimes said to be the only Democrat and Republican still talking to each other. In January, Business Week called them the Senate’s “Odd Couple.” By February, they had finished their work.

Meanwhile, discussions about the entire bill between Dodd and Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the committee, dragged on, repeatedly breaking down. Finally, on February 10th, Dodd called Corker, who, though he was one of the committee’s junior members, agreed to be the chairman’s Republican negotiating partner. When Corker informed McConnell and Shelby, they expressed surprise. “It was an odd place to be,” Corker recalled. “And yet that night we began meeting.” The junior Republican savored the rare experience of creating, rather than opposing, legislation. In response, Shelby’s conservative staff tried to undermine Corker, spreading rumors among Republicans and their lobbyists that he was giving too much away. (A Shelby aide said that staff members were simply informing other Republicans of the Party’s line on financial reform.)

On March 10th, Dodd concluded that he had to move a bill to the floor. He called Corker and said, “You’ve been a great partner.” He was ending their talks after only a month. “It’s a little stunning, I’ve got to be honest,” Corker told reporters afterward. Someone close to the negotiations compared Corker to Dickens’s Miss Havisham, unable to get over the rebuff, forever awaiting the arrival of her groom, all her clocks stopped. Corker later said that Dodd had ended the talks under pressure from the White House and other Democrats. Dodd said that Corker had been unable to bring any other Republicans with him. “Baloney,” Corker said. “If Dodd had reached an agreement with me, we’d’ve had at least twenty-five Republican votes.”

The bill that Dodd brought before the Senate, after a year of discussions with Democrats and Republicans alike, incorporated the bipartisan plan of Warner and Corker to prevent another bank bailout: setting up a fifty-billion-dollar fund, paid for by the banks, to insure orderly liquidation, and establishing a risk council to detect warning signs of another crisis. But in mid-April Mitch McConnell—who had just met with Wall Street executives in New York, and was now parroting talking points from a memo written by the Republican strategist Frank Luntz—called it a “partisan bill” that “will guarantee perpetual taxpayer bailout of Wall Street banks.” McConnell presented a letter, signed by all forty-one Republicans, suggesting that they would filibuster the financial-reform bill.