In another time, Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley would have a list of liberal accomplishments a mile long. While most first-term senators specialize in a few issues, Merkley seems to have a hand in every matter of even marginal relevance to progressives, from civil liberties to housing to LGBT rights to agriculture to banking to climate change to the war in Afghanistan. “He’s progressives’ best-kept secret,” said Becky Bond, political director of the progressive activist group CREDO. “When we’re looking for someone in Washington to carry forward issues we care about, time and time again, the person in the lead turns out to be Jeff Merkley.”

Merkley was instrumental in fashioning the Dodd-Frank financial reform package, authoring measures curtailing predatory mortgage lending as well as the Volcker rule to ban risky proprietary trading by deposit-taking banks. He has proposed numerous climate bills on energy efficiency and electric vehicles, which have been used as models in Obama Administration budgets and even drawn Republican co-sponsors. He championed repeal of the so-called “Monsanto Protection Act,” a provision anonymously tucked into a spending bill which gave the agribusiness giant legal immunity from judicial rulings. He has butted heads with the White House over full combat withdrawals from Afghanistan and, more recently, the NSA’s surveillance programs. And he just found the 51st vote for the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, gay rights legislation bequeathed to him by Ted Kennedy, the previous sponsor.

“In a simple majority Senate, we’d be done with that now,” Merkley said ruefully in a recent interview. But Merkley entered Washington at a time of maximum obstruction and gridlock. He was elected to the Senate in 2009, at the height of one-party Democratic control of government. And yet, right from the beginning, he despaired about the dysfunction in the Senate, where the moniker “the world’s most deliberative legislative body” now works as a punchline. Most of the time, the chamber is empty, while the leaders of the two parties work out whether and how to proceed on daily business. In 2009, Merkley was often the only Senator present, serving as presiding officer (a role required of incoming freshmen), hearing base-pleasing speeches accompanied by little action.

“Everything felt like a partisan talking point,” Merkley said. “There were so many big issues at that time, I kept waiting for the ‘let’s get to work’ moment to start legislating. But it never came.”

Jeff Merkley is one of the small handful of Americans who actually remembers a time when the Senate was a competent legislative body. In 1976, he interned for a summer for liberal Republican Senator Mark Hatfield. He was given responsibility in the office for tracking the Tax Reform Act of 1976. In this era before the Internet or C-SPAN, it was customary for Senate staff members to sit in the gallery every day and watch the debate, so they could inform their bosses about what votes would come up on a given day.