What We'll Miss And What We Won't

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NICKLES: In the past few years, the Senate has become probably more partisan than I think a lot of us like to see. I hope there will be greater attention focused on being statesmen and Senators, sinking into the legislative process and maybe having partisanship a lot lower [in priority].

HOLLINGS: The body politic has got a cancer of money. I ran in 1998, and I raised $8.5 million. That's about $30,000 a week, each week, every week, for six years. If I missed Christmas and New Year's weeks, I'm $100,000 in the hole. So the race begins the next day [after your election]. We're collecting for six years out. That means we don't work on Monday. We don't work on Friday. I've got to get money, money, money, money. And I only listen to the people who give me money. With the shortage of time and everything else, you've got to listen to the $1,000 givers. I mean, no individual is corrupt, but the body has been corrupted. I've been trying to put in a constitutional amendment to regulate or control spending in federal elections. I had 12 Republicans supporting it in the '80s. Now I can't get a Republican because they say, 'Wait a minute. We've got the money. [The Democrats] have got [organized] labor.' [To Nickles]Now y'all have proved we ain't got labor.

BREAUX: Yeah, but [Republicans] have got God on their side.

NICKLES: [Getting up to leave, with a laugh] Well, I'm out of here.

HOLLINGS: Money, money. That's got to be excised. I don't have any time for the people. I don't have any time for the Senators. I just got time for money. Hurry up and get the money so I can get on that TV to get re-elected.

CAMPBELL: Fritz is right. When you divide it up by the number of days you have to raise it, you've got to raise a thousand bucks or two thousand every single day. [But] I'd like to think that with all of our weaknesses and all of our problems, we must be doing something right, because if you look at every emerging country, the kind of government they try to emulate is ours. Because we do have a government in which we try to include everybody, it's complicated as hell. When the Founding Fathers set it up, who in the world could have ever envisioned some of the complicated things we get involved in now, which very often are driven by almost a religious belief—like gun control, partial-birth abortion, gay marriage. I think we get driven an awful lot of times by those narrowly focused constituent groups. Sometimes we listen to those real volatile special interests more than doing the work that most people want—and that's staying somewhere in the middle.

BREAUX: I'm leaving not because I'm unhappy or mad about the Congress. I've been here 32 years in the House and Senate, and I've enjoyed every single minute of it. Some minutes I've enjoyed more than other minutes. But I think that there is a danger that has come upon the system, where we are running a risk of not being in control of our own destiny as a Congress. There are so many outside forces that try to dictate to us what we do, when we do it, and how we'll do it. There are groups that we all represent that think that Congress should be like the Super Bowl, where you have to have one team that wins and one team that loses. We spend an inordinate amount of time in our [party] caucuses talking about what we should do and never hearing the other side. Then we have the public-relations firms and the people in the various lobbying organizations pushing us to make sure that we win and [the other side] loses. There's nothing wrong with both sides getting together and reaching a compromise. Both sides can win. But we don't think like that. When I was here [in the House, as a Congressman in the 1980s] and [minority leader] Bob Michel and [Speaker] Tip O'Neill were running the House, they spoke [to each other] more in one day than the current leaders speak in a whole year.

TIME: What should be fixed in the way things are done in Congress?

BREAUX: We need more interaction between the two parties. I remember [former Louisiana Senator] Russell Long talking about the number of joint lunches [Democrats and Republicans] used to have, where they used to sit down and hear each other out. We don't do that anymore. A lot of the new Senators are from the House. And I would hope that they wouldn't bring the House mentality to the Senate, because it's really a poisonous atmosphere over there. [Representatives] really don't like each other in a lot of cases.

CAMPBELL: If you look at the spectrum of Senators, you're going to find a few who are pretty much driven from the right and a few who are driven from the left. And you're going to find a whole lot more somewhere in the middle. But both parties are driven by constituent groups. We tend to lean on them very heavily, [so Senators will] be good soldiers rather than try to find something in the middle. And that's the way it is often reported in the press with the use of athletic terms—particularly boxing terms, by the way.

TIME: In the 1980s and '90s, Congress enacted major reforms—such as in welfare and taxes—with compromises by both parties. Can it do the same big fixes today that require big compromises?

NICKLES: I would think so and hope so. If you're talking about rewriting the tax code or reforming Social Security, it's going to take bipartisan action. Unfortunately, in the past couple years, the Senate has moved toward this idea that we have to have 60 votes [the number necessary to overcome a filibuster] to pass anything. We need to get away from that. It seemed like there was either a filibuster or a threat of filibuster every other day. That should really be relegated to very few exceptions. The Senate wasn't designed to be filibustered on every little issue or nominee.