Things will start getting real once this happens
By Michael Jones
During the final Senate vote series of the week last Thursday, senators could be seen filing out of the Capitol and en route to the historic Kennedy Caucus Room in the Russell Senate Office Building, where Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) were hosting an all-senators bipartisan lunch for their colleagues.
Senate lunches aren’t anything new. Both parties meet over a private meal most Tuesdays to discuss policy and legislative strategy. But this lunch, more than four weeks into the second-longest federal funding lapse in American history, had the potential to kickstart bipartisan talks on turning the lights back on and extending the Affordable Care Act enhanced premium tax credits—the core demand of Democrats.
However, there was at least one notable name missing from the function, which was scheduled before the shutdown, for the record: Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.).
“I think that’s more rank-and-file members,” Thune told reporters when asked if he would be attending the lunch. “And that’s probably actually good. Because I think that’s where, if this gets resolved, it’s going to get resolved at the rank-and-file level. I don’t think that the Democrat leadership is in a position to be able to figure out a path forward on this.”
Days earlier though, the top two congressional Democrats—Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.)—requested another meeting with President Donald Trump to seek common ground and reach a compromise. The president rebuffed the two leaders before traveling to Asia on official business. But the request itself was the latest demonstration of what Democratic members and aides have told me since before the government ran out of money at the end of last month: All roads lead back to Trump.
“What we’ve seen from Republicans in the House and the Senate is that they behave like a wholly owned subsidiary of Donald Trump and the Trump cartel. That’s how they behave,” Jeffries told me. “And so, of course, our position has been, and I said this directly to the president, with Johnson and Thune right next to me, this does not get resolved until you decide to give permission to Republicans on Capitol Hill to negotiate a bipartisan resolution.”
Senators have remained in informal talks in the meantime, but if Trump continues to stay on the sidelines and Thune is right about a bottom-up solution to the shutdown, then a breakthrough could emerge once a “gang” forms.
Senate gangs are unofficial, bipartisan groups of senators who come together—usually outside of leadership structure—to negotiate solutions to complex or politically sensitive issues that have stalled through normal committee or floor processes.
These groups tend to include roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, often drawn from the chamber’s ideological middle. Their negotiations can be crucial in shaping legislation that requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster or in providing political cover for both parties on contentious votes.
Senate gangs are formed when timing demands action, such as the current shutdown, or when there’s bipartisan pressure from the public, the business community, or interest groups like the AFGE, the largest federal workers’ union, which called on Congress this morning to pass a stopgap measure to end the government shutdown. They also materialize when regular order breaks down, when committees can’t reach consensus, or when party leaders are gridlocked or unwilling to take political risks.
These coalitions also sprout when members want ownership over high-profile issues rather than rubber-stamping leadership deals. For this reason, gangs appeal to members who value the Senate’s self-image as a deliberative, dealmaking body. They can also serve political purposes by allowing centrists to demonstrate independence or moderates to reassert influence in an increasingly polarized chamber.
Senate gangs can frustrate leadership and committee chairs by sidestepping regular order and reporters since they negotiate privately with few leaks to maintain trust. But they are also useful when leadership needs a bipartisan escape hatch.
Over the years, these bipartisan bands have left their fingerprints on some of the most consequential and colorful chapters in recent Senate history.
The Gang of 14 brokered a 2005 deal to defuse a showdown over judicial nominations. The Gang of 8, led by Sens. Schumer, John McCain (R-Ariz.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), produced the 2013 immigration reform bill that passed in the Senate but died in the House. The Gang of 6 tried to craft a sweeping deficit-reduction plan during the Obama-era debt ceiling fight, while the Gang of 20 hammered out the framework for former President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law in 2021. More recently, another group of twenty shepherded the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act into law. Their successes and failures alike underscore the gangs’ recurring role as the Senate’s self-appointed emergency response team whenever regular order collapses.
The era of the Senate gang may itself be running out of time. Many of the members who once defined that brand of pragmatic dealmaking are gone or on their way out —Democrats-turned-independents Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who relished the role of bipartisan broker before they retired this year; Rob Portman of Ohio, whose steady hand helped deliver the infrastructure law before JD Vance succeeded him; and McCain, whose maverick streak once gave these groups moral weight. Even Thom Tillis of North Carolina, one of the few Republicans still willing to work across the aisle, announced his retirement after breaking with the party on Trump’s reconciliation bill earlier this summer.
The next generation of senators may seem less inclined—and less incentivized—to join cross-party working groups that invite primary challengers and online backlash. John Cornyn of Texas, for instance, is in the primary fight of his career due to criticism from the right for his role in crafting the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act alongside Democrats—despite serving as the number-two Senate Republican during Trump’s first term that ushered through most of the president’s conservative legislative priorities and judicial nominees. Now he’s MAGA’s poster child for RINOs—Republicans in Name Only. This type of backlash, which, to be fair, occurs on the left too, may serve as a warning to would-be dealmakers: bipartisan gangs can still solve problems, but in a Senate defined by polarization and performative politics, participating in one is as likely to end a career as it is to make a law.
Adding to the challenge, the loudest and most influential corners of each party’s base now treat compromise as capitulation. Social media amplifies purity tests, turning even modest cross-party collaborations into viral fodder for ideological gatekeeping. That’s made it harder for senators to sell bipartisanship back home and easier for operatives and influencers to define it as weakness.
Still, as long as the filibuster survives, there will always be a structural need for bipartisan problem-solving in the Senate. Sixty votes remain the critical threshold for almost any major piece of legislation and leadership alone rarely commands that kind of coalition. Whether today’s senators can replicate the trust and persistence that once defined the old gangs is another question—but as long as the rules require 60, the impulse to form one won’t disappear entirely.
The situation we find ourselves in now is dire enough that the Senate gang received an unexpected endorsement over the weekend.
“If you put Sen. [Tim] Kaine [(D-Va.)] and I in a room, I think we could figure something out. And that’s part of the solution,” Sen. Paul said on Fox News Sunday. “I suggest President Trump come forward and name three Republicans and three Democrats in the Senate to an official commission to figure this out over a one-month period and come back with a solution.”
You know what they say: The first step to fixing a problem is recognizing you have one.
Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.
