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Eating is banned on the Senate floor, yet since 1965 a stash of candy has sat in a desk on the Republican side. It began with George Murphy, a one term California Republican and former song and dance man from films such as Broadway Melody of 1940 and For Me and My Gal, who kept sweets in his desk. In 1968 he moved to the last row desk on the right side of the aisle beside the east door, next to the elevators to the Capitol subway, where nearly every senator passes, and he started sharing. After Murphy lost in 1970, Paul Fannin of Arizona, Roger Jepsen of Iowa and Harrison Schmitt of New Mexico kept it stocked, and in 1985 Slade Gorton of Washington issued a press release announcing he was its new occupant.

Steve Symms of Idaho began stocking candy donated by confectionery associations, and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who held the desk from 1997 to 2007, drew on Hershey and Just Born under an ethics exception that lets senators accept home state products meant to be shared with visitors. That exception caused a crisis in 2007 for Craig Thomas of Wyoming, a state with no National Confectioners Association members, so his staff rotated small donations from local chocolatiers to keep each under the $100 annual gift limit. Later occupants included George Voinovich of Ohio, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania from 2015 to 2023 and Todd Young of Indiana, while Democrats keep a separate stash paid for out of senators' own pockets.

• Hershey shipped roughly 100 pounds of chocolate and candy to the Senate four times a year during Santorum's decade at the desk.
• Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia collected cash from colleagues to buy candy for the Democratic stash, kept in the roll top desk of the Democratic Conference Secretary.
• Todd Young stocked Kraft Caramels, Red Hots, Albanese gummies and Toxic Waste sour candy from an Indianapolis company.
• In 1997 Senator Kit Bond used candy from the desk to show the size of military microchips during a defense authorization debate.
• Jim Talent of Missouri lured senators to his own desk with low carb Russell Stover chocolates during the Atkins diet craze.

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Howell Heflin was born in June 1921 in Poland, Georgia, and raised in Alabama by a Methodist minister father and a schoolteacher mother, in a family that included his great uncle, Representative Robert Stell Heflin, and his uncle, Senator James Thomas Heflin, a vocal champion of white supremacy. He joined the Marine Corps in 1942, fought in the Pacific at Bougainville and Guam, and earned the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts. After graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1948, he spent two decades as a law professor and attorney in Tuscumbia, then served as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court from 1971 to 1977. In 1978 he beat Walter Flowers in the Senate primary and faced no Republican in the general election after James D. Martin switched to another Senate race.

In the Senate Heflin opposed abortion rights and gun control, backed school prayer and the Gulf War authorization, and was one of two Democrats to vote against the Family and Medical Leave Act, while also opposing NAFTA, GATT and tort reform. He chaired the Senate Select Committee on Ethics, where he pursued a rules case against a fellow Democrat, and he voted against Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, citing Thomas's short time as a federal judge. In 1993 he backed Senator Carol Moseley Braun's effort to deny renewal of a design patent for the United Daughters of the Confederacy that featured the Confederate flag, arguing that national healing had to come first. He retired in 1996, was succeeded by Jeff Sessions, and died in Tuscumbia in 2005 at 83.

• The New York Times called him the conscience of the Senate.
• In 1981, with the Supreme Court granting only 289 of more than 4,200 petitions, he proposed a new National Court of Appeals.
• He contrasted the swift handling of the attackers of Pope John Paul II and Anwar Sadat with the 14 months before John Hinckley Jr. went to trial, and called for a bipartisan crime caucus.
• He was the last Democrat elected to the Senate from Alabama until Doug Jones, a former Heflin aide, won a 2017 special election.
• The Howell Heflin Lock and Dam and a conference room at the University of Alabama School of Law carry his name.

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Cloture, called closure in many Commonwealth countries and the guillotine in the United Kingdom and Australia, takes its name from the French word clôture. The modern rule was forged in 1881, when Charles Stewart Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party used endless amendments and speeches to block Prime Minister William Gladstone's Protection of Person and Property Bill during the Land War. After sittings of 22 and then 41 hours, Speaker Henry Brand refused to recognize any more Irish members on February 2 and forced a vote. Gladstone moved to formalize the power, Parliament adopted a rule in 1882, and by 1887 it had become the closure motion that today needs at least 100 MPs and the Speaker's consent. In the United States, a blockade by 12 senators of Woodrow Wilson's bill to arm merchant ships against German submarines led the Senate to adopt a cloture rule on March 8, 1917, by 76 to 3.

The original two thirds threshold proved nearly impossible to reach: 11 cloture attempts between 1927 and 1962 all failed, as Southern Democrats used the filibuster to block civil rights bills. In 1975 the Senate lowered the bar to three fifths of senators duly chosen and sworn, the familiar 60 votes, and the modern process requires 16 signatures, a ripening period, and up to 30 hours of germane debate. In November 2013 Harry Reid used a point of order and an appeal of the chair's ruling to set a simple majority for most nominations, and Mitch McConnell extended the same precedent to Supreme Court nominees in April 2017. The story then turns to Canada's strict closure rule and a 2012 Hong Kong filibuster ended by the council president with no rule on the books.

• The Lord Speaker in the House of Lords has virtually no power to stop debate and can only warn that closure is meant for exceptional circumstances.
• The Senate first used its new cloture rule in 1919 to end debate on the Treaty of Versailles.
• Canada adopted closure in 1913 under Prime Minister Robert Borden to break opposition delays on a naval aid bill.
• Closure invoked on December 15, 1964, ended the Great Canadian Flag Debate and led to the red maple leaf design.
• In Hong Kong on May 17, 2012, after a filibuster of more than 33 hours, the council president cited Standing Order 92 to end debate without a vote.

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Abscam began in March 1978 as an art theft and stolen property sting run by agent John Good out of the FBI's Hauppauge office on Long Island. The Bureau enlisted convicted swindler Melvin Weinberg, who with girlfriend Evelyn Knight received probation in exchange for designing the front. Agents created Abdul Enterprises, placed $1 million in a Chase Manhattan account, and posed as wealthy Arab sheiks. The code name drew complaints from Arab American groups, and the FBI said it stood for Abdul Scam. When a suspected forger suggested Atlantic City casino licenses could be bought, the operation shifted to politics, and Camden Mayor Angelo Errichetti began introducing agents to officials, promising "I'll give you Atlantic City."

Officials were offered cash, first $100,000 and later $50,000, for private immigration bills and other favors, recorded on hidden cameras in a hotel near JFK Airport, a Washington townhouse and a yacht in Florida. Six House members and Senator Harrison A. Williams of New Jersey were convicted. Defense lawyers argued entrapment, but appeals courts held that officials were free to refuse, and refusals by others undercut the defense. In 1981 Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued the first guidelines for FBI undercover operations, and historian Ivan Greenberg has suggested the sting may have reflected FBI resentment of congressional investigations in the 1970s.

• Williams was convicted on nine counts in a deal involving 18 percent of a titanium mining venture held through his lawyer.
• Representative Richard Kelly claimed he took the money as part of his own secret investigation.
• Representative John Jenrette was taped saying he had larceny in his blood.
• Representative John Murtha declined $50,000 on tape and was not prosecuted, and Senator Larry Pressler rejected the offer and reported it.
• Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione refused a proposed $300,000 bribe to gaming officials for his Atlantic City casino.

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Wallace F. Bennett was born in Salt Lake City in 1898, majored in English and lettered in debate at the University of Utah, and served as an infantry instructor in World War I. In 1920 he started as an office clerk at his father's Bennett's Paint and Glass Company and worked up through cashier, production manager and sales manager to president in 1938. He also organized a Ford dealership, hosted a daily radio show, directed a nurses' chorus and wrote hymn lyrics, and in 1949 was elected president of the National Association of Manufacturers. In 1950 he unseated three term Democratic Senator Elbert D. Thomas 54 to 46 percent in a campaign that circulated pamphlets tying Thomas to communist positions.

On the Finance and Banking committees, Bennett warned early about a silver shortage. By 1963 the Treasury had about 30 million ounces of free silver but needed over 75 million a year for coins, while the market price rose to $1.29 an ounce. He backed the Silver Purchase Act of 1963, which replaced silver certificates with Federal Reserve notes, then told the American Mining Congress that silver had to come out of coins, and helped pass the Coinage Act of 1965 and its copper-nickel dimes and quarters. He opposed Medicare and the Equal Rights Amendment yet voted for the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act. He died in 1993 at 95.

• The Silver Purchase Act freed about 1.6 billion ounces of silver for the Treasury.
• He voted to confirm Thurgood Marshall but missed the vote on the 24th Amendment banning poll taxes.
• He helped bring defense and aerospace work to Utah and pushed the Central Utah Project for water.
• He resigned on December 20, 1974, so successor Jake Garn could gain seniority over other incoming senators.
• His son Bob Bennett won the same Senate seat in 1992.

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Key Pittman was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1872, tutored privately, and studied law at Southwestern Presbyterian University, now Rhodes College. In 1897 he left law for the Klondike Gold Rush and worked as a miner until 1901, then moved to the silver boomtown of Tonopah, Nevada, in 1902. He lost a nonbinding 1910 popular vote for the Senate to Republican George S. Nixon, but after Nixon died in 1912, Pittman beat interim Senator William A. Massey in the popular vote, and the legislature seated him in January 1913, months before the 17th Amendment was ratified. He won every election after that through 1940, becoming president pro tempore and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

His 1918 Pittman Act let the U.S. melt up to 350 million silver dollars for Britain, which faced a run on the banks in India, while requiring the Treasury to buy replacement silver from American miners at $1 an ounce. In 1937 he co-wrote the Pittman-Robertson Act, funding wildlife habitat with an excise tax on firearms and ammunition, and in 1939 he wrote the cash and carry law that let warring nations buy U.S. arms if they paid upfront and shipped them themselves. Days before the November 1940 election he suffered a severe heart attack, and aides described him as hospitalized for exhaustion. He won and died on November 10 at Washoe General Hospital in Reno.

• A popular legend says aides kept his body on ice in a bathtub at Tonopah's Mizpah Hotel, which the episode shows could not have happened.
• Former Nevada State Archivist Guy Rocha called the real cover-up just as disreputable as the myth.
• Because Britain controlled the seas, cash and carry worked in practice for the Allies.
• The Key Pittman Wildlife Management Area near Hiko and the Pittman Wash in Henderson carry his name.
• His widow, Mimosa Gates, gave his papers to the Library of Congress in 1941, withdrew them in 1942, and returned them in 1954.

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This episode traces the filibuster from its roots to its modern forms. The word descends from the Dutch vrijbuiter and Spanish filibustero, meaning freebooter or plunderer, and was applied in the 1800s to American adventurers such as William Walker before it came to mean legislative obstruction. In 60 BCE Cato the Younger talked until dusk to block Julius Caesar's request to run for consul in absentia, forcing Caesar to give up his triumph. In 59 BCE Caesar had Cato arrested mid speech during a land bill debate, released him when senators walked out, and took the bill to a popular assembly instead. Later cases include Roseller Lim's 18 hour stand in the Philippine Senate in 1963 and Texas state senator Bill Meier's 43 hours in 1977.

When speaking limits arrived, opponents turned to paperwork. French lawmakers filed 137,449 amendments in 2006 against the privatization of Gaz de France, and Hong Kong lawmakers filed 1.9 million in 2013. In the U.S. Senate, the filibuster traces to 1806, when the chamber dropped its previous question motion on Aaron Burr's advice, and it was first used in 1837. Today ending debate takes 60 votes, filibusters are often just a notice to leadership, and both parties have used the nuclear option on nominations. The episode sets out the arguments of defenders who call the filibuster the soul of the Senate and critics who say it lets a minority block most legislation.

• Lim was stalling for colleague Alejandro Almendras, who arrived and voted for Ferdinand Marcos anyway.
• Meier wore a catheter and collection bag to hold the floor without a restroom break.
• In 1997 Ontario's New Democrats used mail merge to file 11,500 amendments seeking hearings for individual Toronto streets, and one passed by mistake.
• Jacob Rees-Mogg proposed in 2012 that Somerset get its own time zone 15 minutes behind London.
• Hakeem Jeffries used the House magic minute in 2025 to speak for 8 hours and 44 minutes.

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Pete Wilson was born in Illinois in 1933 and raised in St. Louis. He earned an English degree at Yale, served as a Marine infantry officer, and finished law school at UC Berkeley in 1962, then failed the California bar three times before passing. After disliking criminal defense work, he became an advance man for Richard Nixon's run for governor and Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign. Elected mayor of San Diego in 1971, he restructured city government and pushed downtown redevelopment. When the 1972 Republican convention was moved from San Diego to Miami Beach amid the ITT scandal, he declared that week America's Finest City Week, a phrase that became the city's nickname.

Wilson beat Governor Jerry Brown for the Senate in 1982, pressing Brown's appointment of Chief Justice Rose Bird. In the Senate he backed the Strategic Defense Initiative, voted for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, voted to override Reagan's veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act, and championed 1988 reparations for interned Japanese Americans. Elected governor in 1990, he raised taxes during a deep recession, vetoed AB 101 in 1991, and in 1994 won reelection with 55 percent after backing three strikes sentencing and Proposition 187, which federal courts struck down. He left office in 1999 with a $16 billion surplus, and his 1996 electricity deregulation law was later tied to the 2000 and 2001 energy crisis.

• In May 1985 he was brought by ambulance from Bethesda Naval Hospital, still on an IV after appendix surgery, to cast a tie-breaking budget vote.
• A 63 day budget standoff in 1992 forced California to pay workers and vendors with registered warrants.
• His budgets included a sales tax on snack foods and a roughly 40 percent university tuition increase.
• A vocal cord nodule and surgery sidelined his 1996 presidential bid, and he was the first major candidate to drop out.
• He co-chaired Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign in the 2003 recall election.

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Warren G. Harding was born in Ohio in 1865 into an abolitionist family, and at 18 he and partners paid $300 for the failing Marion Star. He kept the daily edition nonpartisan and the weekly mildly Republican to sell to both sides of a divided county. He married Florence Kling, a divorced piano teacher five years older, who ran the paper's circulation and finances. Her father, Amos Kling, spread rumors that Harding had African American ancestry, a claim DNA testing refuted in 2015. Harding rose to state senator and lieutenant governor by avoiding conflict, won Ohio's first direct Senate election in 1914, and delayed firm positions on Prohibition and suffrage until the outcome was clear.

Promising a return to normalcy, he won the 1920 election in a landslide. He created the Bureau of the Budget, pursued naval disarmament at the Washington Naval Conference, released Eugene Debs, and appointed Herbert Hoover, Charles Evans Hughes and Andrew Mellon. He also placed friends known as the Ohio Gang in power. Interior Secretary Albert Fall secretly leased naval oil reserves including Teapot Dome, and Veterans Bureau chief Charles Forbes sold off hospital supplies. Harding died of a heart attack in San Francisco in August 1923 during his Voyage of Understanding, and was widely mourned before the scandals and revelations about his private life broke.

• He sided with William Howard Taft in a feud, leaving behind his longtime political mentor.
• He reportedly choked Forbes against a wall at the White House, then let him resign and leave for Europe.
• Justice Department associate Jess Smith died by suicide as exposure of influence peddling loomed.
• Letters later revealed a 15 year affair with Carrie Fulton Phillips, the wife of a Marion friend.
• Nan Britton's bestselling book claimed she had his child and described meetings in a White House coat closet.

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John Sherman was born in Ohio in 1823, the eighth of 11 children, and was six when his father, a state Supreme Court justice, died and the family was split up. His brother William Tecumseh Sherman became the Union general. Expelled from school for punching a teacher, John became a junior surveyor at 14 and lost the job in 1838 when a Democratic governor cleared out Whig appointees. He studied law with his brother Charles in Mansfield, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 drew him into Congress. He co-wrote a 1,188 page report on Bleeding Kansas, then lost a two month race for Speaker in 1859 after endorsing Hinton Rowan Helper's book The Impending Crisis of the South, which he had not read.

Made chairman of Ways and Means in 1860 and then a senator in 1861, Sherman championed the Legal Tender Act that created greenbacks and the National Banking Act of 1863, backed by a 10 percent tax on state bank notes. He then pushed the Coinage Act of 1873, which critics called the Crime of 73, and as Rutherford B. Hayes's Treasury Secretary built the gold reserve that let greenbacks reach parity in 1879. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1880, 1884 and 1888, helped shape the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, and wrote the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. He served over 42 years in federal office and died in 1900.

• By the end of 1861 the Union was spending about $2 million a day.
• He opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act, blaming corporate labor contracts rather than immigrants for low wages.
• His brother William warned him early that the Civil War would be long and costly.
• William McKinley made him Secretary of State at 73 in 1897, opening a Senate seat for Mark Hanna.
• His will set aside $10,000 to pay a competent writer for his biography.