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Zell Miller was born in 1932 in Young Harris, Georgia. His father, a teacher, died of cerebral meningitis when Miller was 17 days old, and his mother raised him alone through the Great Depression. After an associate's degree and time at Emory University, he landed in a North Georgia drunk tank after the Korean War armistice, a moment he called his rock bottom, and on release enlisted in the Marine Corps, rising to sergeant over three years. He earned history degrees at the University of Georgia and taught in Young Harris, then served as mayor and state senator. In 1964 and 1966 he ran for Congress endorsing segregation and attacking Lyndon Johnson, and later, as executive secretary to Governor Lester Maddox, persuaded him to integrate the State Patrol and appoint African Americans to state boards.

In 1980 Lieutenant Governor Miller challenged Senator Herman Talmadge over his segregationist past and lost the primary, and Talmadge then lost to a Republican. After a record 16 years as lieutenant governor he won the governorship in 1990 with James Carville running his campaign. He gave the 1992 Democratic keynote at Madison Square Garden backing Bill Clinton. Appointed to the Senate in 2000, he backed George W. Bush's tax cuts, and in 2004 he returned to the same arena to give the Republican keynote attacking John Kerry, yet kept his Democratic registration for life. He died in Young Harris in 2018, and Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush attended his state funeral.

• His lottery funded HOPE Scholarship paid public college tuition for Georgia students with a 3.0 average.
• His seven deadly sins law, approved by voters in 1994, mandated life without parole for a second conviction for crimes such as murder, armed robbery and kidnapping.
• As governor he welcomed the Gay Games to Atlanta, but in the Senate he backed a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.
• After the 2004 speech he told Chris Matthews to get out of his face and said he wished he could challenge him to a duel.
• He later co-chaired Newt Gingrich's 2012 campaign and sat on the board of the National Rifle Association.

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The Constitution sets 30 as the minimum age for a senator, yet the early Senate seated 28 year olds Armistead Thomson Mason and John Eaton and 29 year old Henry Clay, because it judged its own members and did not check. The chamber itself nearly broke the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when small states threatened to leave rather than accept representation by population. The Connecticut Compromise gave every state two senators and passed 5 to 4, and Article 5 bars taking away a state's equal Senate vote without its consent. James Madison described the Senate in Federalist 62 as a stabilizing body, and its name comes from the Latin senex, old man. State legislatures chose senators until the 17th Amendment of 1913.

The Senate confirms nominees, ratifies treaties by two thirds, and tries impeachments, where only seven of 16 officials tried have been convicted and no president. It cannot originate revenue bills but can replace a House bill's entire text with an amendment in the nature of a substitute. The filibuster traces to 1805, when Vice President Aaron Burr suggested dropping the previous question motion, which had allowed a majority to end debate. John C. Calhoun and others were using the gap by 1841, Woodrow Wilson pushed through the first cloture rule in 1917, and the threshold settled at 60 votes in the 1970s. Political scientist Robert Dahl calls the chamber counter-majoritarian, while defenders say it forces broad geographic compromise.

• Joe Biden was elected at 29 in 1972 and turned 30 before his swearing in.
• In 1837 the Senate chose Richard Mentor Johnson as vice president after faithless electors left him one vote short.
• Forty-eight of the chamber's 100 desks date to the 1819 rebuilding after the British burned Washington, and senators carve their names inside the drawers.
• In 1790 Virginia had about ten times Rhode Island's population, while California now has about 70 times Wyoming's.
• A possibly apocryphal story has George Washington telling Thomas Jefferson that the Senate is the saucer where House legislation cools.

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Robert Torricelli was born in 1951 in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of a school librarian and a lawyer, and earned the nickname The Torch for his aggressive campaigning at New York's Storm King School. He graduated from Rutgers and Rutgers Law School, earned a master's at Harvard's Kennedy School by 1980, worked for Governor Brendan Byrne, served as associate counsel to Vice President Walter Mondale, managed the Carter-Mondale Illinois primary, and directed the rules committee at the 1980 Democratic convention. In 1982 he unseated Republican Harold Hollenbeck in New Jersey's 9th District and spent 14 years in the House, delivering the Democratic closing speech in the 1991 Gulf War authorization debate.

After a 1988 trip to Cuba in which he said the island lacked the homelessness and hunger seen elsewhere in Latin America, he sponsored the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act, saying it would wreak havoc on the island, while receiving contributions from the Cuban American National Foundation. He won Bill Bradley's Senate seat in 1996 over Dick Zimmer and, as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, recruited Hillary Clinton and helped his party take the majority. Illegal donations tied to David Chang led to a 2002 Senate Ethics Committee admonishment, even though federal prosecutors had dropped their probe. On September 30, 2002, with ballots printed, he quit the race, and the New Jersey Supreme Court allowed Frank Lautenberg to replace him.

• David Chang pleaded guilty to election law violations tied to the 1996 campaign.
• The allegations included cash, suits, a Rolex watch and a big screen television.
• On the Finance Committee he won the first partial tax deduction for college tuition.
• In 2003 a federal court named him special master over the Honeywell cleanup of a chemical site in Jersey City.
• In 2007 he moved his leftover campaign funds into his Rosemont Foundation, which gave to animal welfare charities.

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Paul Simon, the Illinois senator, was born in 1928 in Eugene, Oregon, to Martin and Ruth Simon, Lutheran missionaries who had served in China. His brother Arthur later founded Bread for the World. After attending several colleges without graduating, the 19 year old borrowed $3,600 from a Lions Club in 1948, bought the defunct Troy Call in Troy, Illinois, renamed it the Troy Tribune, and became the youngest editor and publisher in the country. His exposés of gambling, prostitution and official corruption drew the attention of Governor Adlai Stevenson II and led to testimony before the Kefauver Committee. He built a chain of 14 weekly papers, then enlisted in 1951 and served in Army counterintelligence in West Germany.

Elected to the Illinois House after his discharge, Simon adopted his bow tie after a newspaper wrote that the man with the bow tie did well. As lieutenant governor from 1968 he served alongside Republican Governor Richard Ogilvie, the only split executive ticket in state history, and the two passed Illinois's first income tax. He lost the 1972 governor's primary to Dan Walker after accepting Richard J. Daley's backing, then won a U.S. House seat in 1974, unseated Senator Charles Percy in 1984, and led in Iowa in late 1987 before losing the 1988 caucuses to Dick Gephardt. He wrote more than 20 books and died in December 2003 at 75 after heart surgery.

• He served with Abner Mikva in a reform bloc the press called the Kosher Nostra.
• He married fellow legislator Jeanne Hurley in 1960, the first marriage between two sitting Illinois lawmakers, and their daughter Sheila became lieutenant governor.
• He co-wrote a balanced budget amendment with Orrin Hatch and voted against the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996.
• UN commander Romeo Dallaire credited him for pressing the U.S. to act during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
• Days before his death he endorsed Howard Dean by phone from his hospital bed, and his last book was Our Culture of Pandering.

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Mark Hatfield was born in 1922 in Dallas, Oregon, the son of a railroad blacksmith and a schoolteacher. As a teenage tour guide at the Oregon State Capitol he slipped into the governor's office, sat in the governor's chair, and wrote out a life plan: legislature, Senate, then a blank space for the presidency. In 1940, at 17, he struck and killed a six year old girl while driving his mother's car and was found civilly liable. After Willamette University he served as a Navy landing craft officer at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, walked through Hiroshima after the bombing, and saw colonial inequality in French Indochina. Elected to the Oregon House in 1950 at 28, he passed a 1953 law banning racial discrimination in public accommodations.

Hatfield became Oregon's youngest secretary of state in 1956 and governor in 1958, winning in a landslide after Senator Wayne Morse suggested he had lied about the car accident. At the 1964 Republican convention he gave the keynote and opposed Barry Goldwater's conservatism, and he was the only governor to vote against a resolution backing the Vietnam War. Elected to the Senate in 1966, he was passed over for vice president by Richard Nixon in 1968 despite Billy Graham's backing. He co-wrote the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment to cut off war funding, and in 1995 he cast the deciding vote against the balanced budget amendment. He retired in 1996 after 11 campaigns and no defeats.

• He built early support by sending handwritten notes to people named in newspaper notices of births, deaths and graduations.
• As a student he drove Paul Robeson to Portland after Salem hotels refused to house him.
• He was the only senator to vote to confirm both Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas.
• In 1984 it emerged that his wife had been paid $55,000 by arms dealer Basil Tsakos, who was lobbying him on a pipeline project.
• As Appropriations chair he steered money to medical research, and an NIH clinical research center bears his name.

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Lincoln Chafee comes from a family that reached Massachusetts in the 1630s and gave Rhode Island a governor in his great-great-grandfather and a governor, Navy secretary and senator in his father, John Chafee. After Phillips Academy and Brown University, where he studied classics and captained the wrestling team, he attended a 16 week farrier school in Bozeman, Montana, and spent seven years shoeing horses at harness tracks in the U.S. and Canada. Elected to the Warwick City Council in 1985 and mayor in 1992, the first Republican in 32 years, he settled a long teachers union dispute, paid down debt and pension liabilities, and won EPA recognition for sewer work to protect the bay.

Appointed to the Senate after his father's death in 1999, he won a full term in 2000 and became the only Republican to vote against authorizing the Iraq war and against confirming Samuel Alito. He lost to Sheldon Whitehouse in 2006 after a primary against Steve Laffey, left the party in 2007, and won the governorship as an independent in 2010 with 36 percent. He joined the Democrats in 2013, ran for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, moved to Wyoming, and in 2019 became a Libertarian, filing for that party's 2020 presidential nomination before withdrawing. He was the last non-Democrat to hold statewide or congressional office in Rhode Island.

• He shod a horse named Overburden that set a track record in Edmonton.
• He opposed the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts on pay as you go grounds.
• As governor he sent a special master into bankrupt Central Falls.
• He opposed the state backed $75 million loan to Curt Schilling's 38 Studios, and after its collapse the state recovered about $17 million.
• He called the State House tree a holiday tree in 2011 and signed Rhode Island's same-sex marriage law in 2013.

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Evan Bayh was born in 1955 and grew up largely in Shirkieville, Indiana, the son of Senator Birch Bayh and grandson of basketball coach Birch Bayh Sr. He attended St. Albans School in Washington, earned a business degree at Indiana University Bloomington and a law degree at the University of Virginia, and clerked for U.S. District Judge James Noland. In 1986 he survived a Republican challenge to his state residency and won the Indiana secretary of state race with 53 percent. Two years later he beat Lieutenant Governor John Mutz to become, at 33, the youngest governor in the nation, ending 20 years of Republican control. He won reelection in 1992 with 63 percent and left office with approval near 80 percent.

In 1998 Bayh won his father's old Senate seat with 64 percent, the largest margin for a Democrat in an Indiana Senate race, and chaired the Democratic Leadership Council. In 2008 he was on Barack Obama's vice presidential shortlist, and campaign manager David Plouffe later said the choice came down to a coin toss with Joe Biden, though Obama's memoir leaves Bayh out. In February 2010, one day before the filing deadline, he announced he would not seek a third term. He then joined McGuireWoods and Apollo Global Management. His 2016 comeback collapsed over questions about his residency, and he lost to Todd Young by nearly 10 points, the first defeat of his career.

• His 21st Century Scholars program promised eighth graders free college tuition if they kept their grades up and stayed out of trouble.
• In 2002 he stood in the Rose Garden with President George W. Bush to announce the Iraq war resolution.
• In 2010 he voted to block the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
• His wife Susan sat on corporate boards including Eli Lilly and Anthem while he served in the Senate.
• In 2016 records showed him listed as an inactive Indiana voter, and he gave a reporter the wrong address for his Indianapolis condo.

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Herb Kohl was born in Milwaukee in 1935 to Max and Mary Kohl, Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia who arrived in the 1920s with nothing. He attended Washington High School, graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1956, where his roommate was future baseball commissioner Bud Selig, and earned a Harvard MBA in 1958 before serving in the Army Reserve. With his brother he grew the family business into a chain of 50 grocery stores plus department stores, pharmacies and liquor stores, becoming president of Kohl's in 1970 before the family sold the company to BATUS Inc. in 1978. As chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party from 1975, he helped deliver supermajorities in both legislative chambers in 1976, then stepped down in 1977.

In 1985 Kohl bought the Milwaukee Bucks from Jim Fitzgerald for $18 million to keep the team from leaving. In 2003 he rejected a $170 million offer from Michael Jordan because he could not be sure the team would stay, and in 2014 he sold it for $550 million to Wes Edens and Marc Lasry, who committed to keeping it in Wisconsin. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1988 over Susan Engeleiter, he largely self-funded four terms and compiled an independent record before retiring in 2012, saying there is something to be said for not staying in office too long.

• His Bucks cycled through six head coaches, and coach Don Nelson resigned in 1987.
• After the Bucks won the 2021 NBA title, the new owners put him in the lead parade car and gave him a championship ring.
• He voted for the 2001 tax cuts and a balanced budget amendment but opposed NAFTA and CAFTA.
• In 2005 he won a requirement that handguns sold in the U.S. include child safety locks, attached to a larger bill.
• He gave $25 million toward the University of Wisconsin's Kohl Center, and his foundation awards $400,000 a year to Wisconsin students and teachers.

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For more than a century, Americans did not vote for their U.S. senators. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Wilson alone argued for popular election and lost 10 to 1, so state legislatures chose senators, a design meant to shield the states from federal overreach and give the Senate a House of Lords style distance from public passions. In practice the system produced long deadlocks and bribery scandals. Indiana left a seat empty for two years in the 1850s, Delaware left one vacant from 1899 to 1903, a third of the Oregon House refused to take their oaths in 1897, and Montana copper baron William A. Clark resigned in 1900 after a Senate committee found he had bought legislators' votes. Scholars Jay Bybee and Todd Zywicki counter that only ten cases of impropriety were ever formally contested.

The Populists made direct election part of their 1892 Omaha platform, and David Graham Phillips attacked Nelson Aldrich in The Treason of the Senate. The House passed direct election amendments in 1893, 1900, 1904 and 1908, but the Senate blocked them until Oregon's pledge system and petitions from 31 states for a constitutional convention forced its hand. A 1911 rider would have stripped Congress of power over Senate election rules, protecting Southern disenfranchisement, and it was removed only when Vice President James S. Sherman broke a 44 to 44 tie. The amendment was ratified in April 1913. Today 46 states let governors fill vacancies, and some lawmakers now seek repeal.

• Under the Oregon system, legislative candidates pledged to vote for the winner of a popular Senate primary.
• Senator Joseph L. Bristow of Kansas proposed the amendment that stripped out the race rider.
• By one analysis, the old malapportioned legislatures would have handed Republicans the Senate in 1916.
• Rod Blagojevich was caught on wiretaps trying to sell Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat in 2009.
• Surveys cited in the episode show about 71 percent of Americans prefer electing senators directly, with 15 to 19 percent backing repeal.

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Warren Magnuson was born in 1905 in Moorhead, Minnesota, with sealed birth records, and was adopted by William and Emma Magnuson, Scandinavian immigrants who ran a bar. After his adoptive father left, he played quarterback, captained the baseball team, delivered telegrams and rode freight trains into Canada to work on wheat threshing crews. In 1925 he followed a high school girlfriend to Seattle, enrolled at the University of Washington, and hauled ice for the Teamsters under Dave Beck. He passed the bar in 1929, became a King County special prosecutor in 1932, and as a state representative sponsored the first unemployment compensation bill in the country. In 1936 he won the Seattle area House seat of his friend Marion Zioncheck, who withdrew and then took his own life.

Magnuson served on the USS Enterprise in the Pacific before Franklin Roosevelt recalled members of Congress in 1942. After winning a Senate seat in 1944, he had the governor appoint him to the vacancy a month early, giving him seniority over the rest of his freshman class. As Commerce Committee chair he managed the hearings that moved the Civil Rights Act of 1964 around the segregationist controlled Judiciary Committee, and he wrote the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. After 44 years in Congress, and while serving as president pro tempore, he lost to Slade Gorton in 1980. He died in 1989, still lobbying for school funding despite diabetes and amputations.

• He was endorsed in 1936 by both the left wing Washington Commonwealth Federation and Seattle's business community.
• In 1949 he passed a private bill granting residency to Poon Lim, a Chinese sailor who survived 133 days on a raft.
• In 1950 he cabled General Douglas MacArthur proposing that Japanese individuals be allowed to enlist in the U.S. armed forces.
• He banned oil supertankers from Puget Sound by attaching a few lines to a routine bill placed on the consent calendars.
• He married a former Miss Seattle and, after their divorce, spent decades as one of Washington's best known bachelors.