https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/09/the-empty-chamber
The weakened institution could no longer withstand pressures from outside its walls; as money and cameras rushed in, independent minds fell more and more in line with the partisans. Rough parity between the two parties meant that every election had the potential to make or break a majority, crushing the incentive to coöperate across the aisle. The Senate, no longer a fount of ideas, became a backwater of the U.S. government. During the Clinton years, the main action was between the White House and the Gingrich House of Representatives; during the Bush years, the Republican Senate majority abdicated the oversight role that could have placed a vital check on executive power.Norman Ornstein, a congressional expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said that the Senate has increasingly become populated by “ideologues and charlatans.” He went on, “When we do get good people who come in, they very quickly get ground up by the dynamic and the culture of the parties. And once you get there, look at what it takes to stay there.” He spoke of Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, who, nearing the end of his career, spent much of last year working closely with his friend Max Baucus on the health-care bill. Then, in August, Grassley went home and, faced with angry Republican voters and the prospect of a primary challenge from the right, started warning about “pulling the plug on Grandma.” Ornstein added that similar pressures had led John McCain to begin “altering his behavior and abandoning every issue, including campaign-finance reform.”