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Jim Jeffords was born in Rutland, Vermont, in 1934, the son of Vermont Supreme Court Chief Justice Olin M. Jeffords. After Yale in 1956 he served as a Navy officer on the USS McNair, the first ship to enter the Suez Canal after the 1956 crisis, and took part in the 1958 Lebanon response. He earned a Harvard law degree in 1962, entered local politics in Shrewsbury, won the state senate in 1966 and became attorney general in 1968. Elected to Vermont's only House seat in 1974, he came from the progressive Aiken-Gibson wing of the state party and in 1981 was the only one of 192 House Republicans to vote against Ronald Reagan's tax cuts.

Elected to the Senate in 1988, he backed Bill Clinton's 1993 health plan, was one of five Republicans to vote to acquit Clinton, and lobbied for intervention in Rwanda in 1994. With the Senate split 50 to 50 after the 2000 election, he demanded full funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act before backing the Bush tax cuts. On May 24, 2001, he left the Republican Party to caucus with Democrats as an independent, flipping control of the chamber. He then voted against the Iraq war authorization and the Department of Homeland Security, but for the Medicare prescription drug bill. He retired in 2006, was succeeded by Bernie Sanders, and died in August 2014 at 80.

• He sat at the Senate candy desk and sang in the Singing Senators with Trent Lott, John Ashcroft and Larry Craig.
• UN commander Romeo Dallaire recorded him as one of only two senators pressing for action in Rwanda.
• Harry Reid promised him the Environment and Public Works chairmanship and his seniority.
• Before the switch he had the lowest American Conservative Union rating of any Republican senator.
• Only one Republican, Chuck Grassley, spoke on the floor to honor him at his farewell.

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Ralph Owen Brewster was born in Dexter, Maine, in 1888, a direct descendant of Mayflower leader William Brewster. He graduated summa cum laude from Bowdoin, spent a year as a high school principal in Castine, and earned a Harvard law degree in 1913 before practicing in Portland and helping lead the Committee of 100 to replace the ward system with a city manager. Elected to the Maine House in 1916, he resigned to enlist as a private in World War I and rose to captain. In the 1924 governor's race his opponent accused him of Ku Klux Klan backing. He denied membership, but Klan members worked for his campaign, and former Governor Percival Baxter publicly condemned him.

After losing a 1932 House race to John Utterback and contesting the result, Brewster won the 1934 rematch and later moved to the Senate, serving on the Truman Committee and the Pearl Harbor inquiry. In 1947, as chairman of a special committee on war contracts, he targeted Howard Hughes over $40 million for aircraft including the Spruce Goose. Hughes accused him of serving Pan Am and testified that Brewster offered to drop the probe if TWA merged with Pan Am. Brewster stepped down from the chair to testify and faced questioning from Hughes. In 1952 Hughes put $60,000 behind Governor Frederick G. Payne, who beat Brewster in the primary. Brewster died of cancer on Christmas Day 1961.

• In 1935 he accused New Deal lawyer Thomas Corcoran of threatening the Passamaquoddy tidal power project to win his vote.
• More than 200 residents of Lubec hanged him in effigy with a sign calling him a double-crosser.
• His alignment with Joseph McCarthy set him against fellow Maine Republican Margaret Chase Smith.
• He resigned in December 1952 and later served a term as president of the Christian Science Mother Church in Boston.
• Alan Alda received an Oscar nomination for playing him in Martin Scorsese's 2004 film The Aviator.

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Hiram Johnson was born in Sacramento in 1866, the son of Grove L. Johnson, a legislator and congressman dogged by accusations of graft and election fraud. Valedictorian at 16, he worked as a stenographer in his father's law office before studying law at UC Berkeley, and he later held license number two when the State Bar of California was organized in 1927. In 1908, while assisting in the San Francisco graft prosecution of Mayor Eugene Schmitz and boss Abe Ruef, he took over the case after lead prosecutor Francis Heney was shot in court, and won a conviction. In 1910 he ran for governor with the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, touring by open automobile rather than on the Southern Pacific Railroad he campaigned against.

As governor he created a railroad commission, cross-filing, and the initiative, referendum and recall, which he said were not a panacea. He also signed the 1913 Alien Land Law barring Asian immigrants from owning land and later helped pass the Immigration Act of 1924. He was Theodore Roosevelt's running mate on the 1912 Bull Moose ticket, entered the Senate in 1917, fought the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, declined the 1920 vice presidential spot with Warren G. Harding, endorsed Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, and then broke with him over the 1937 court packing plan. He died at a naval hospital in Maryland on August 5, 1945, one day before the bombing of Hiroshima.

• A universal health insurance measure he backed lost 27 to 73 after insurers mailed pamphlets showing the German Kaiser.
• His 1918 Johnson-Nolan bill for a $3 daily federal minimum wage died in conference after a filibuster by Southern Democrats.
• A 1943 British intelligence analysis called his isolationism implacable and uncompromising.
• Nominated by both major parties in 1934, he won reelection with 94.5 percent of the vote.
• The recall he created removed Governor Gray Davis in 2003 and was attempted against Gavin Newsom in 2021.

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Daniel Akaka was born in Honolulu in 1924, decades before statehood, to a family with Chinese and Native Hawaiian roots, and Hawaiian was his first language. He graduated from Kamehameha Schools in 1942 and served in the Army Corps of Engineers from 1945 to 1947 on Saipan and Tinian. He worked as a welder, a mechanic and, in 1948, first mate on the schooner Morning Star, married Mary Mildred "Millie" Chong, and used the GI Bill to earn education degrees at the University of Hawaii. He taught high school from 1953 and became a principal in 1963, then held state posts including director of the Hawaii Office of Economic Opportunity and aide to Governor George Ariyoshi before winning a U.S. House seat in 1976.

Appointed to the Senate after Spark Matsunaga died in 1990, he beat Pat Saiki with nearly 54 percent, won in 1994 with over 70 percent, and survived a 2006 primary from Ed Case. As chair of the Veterans Affairs and Indian Affairs committees, he pushed for belated Medals of Honor for Japanese American soldiers of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and 100th Infantry Battalion, and for benefits for Philippine Scouts. From 2000 until 2013 he sought federal recognition for Native Hawaiians through the Akaka Bill, which critics called race based. Time named him one of the five worst senators in 2006, while voters at home reelected him by wide margins. He died on April 6, 2018, at 93.

• In 1981 he voted for Ronald Reagan's Economic Recovery Tax Act and against the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act.
• He championed the Abandoned Shipwreck Act of 1987, which moved title of historic wrecks to the states.
• In October 2002 he voted against authorizing military force in Iraq.
• A 2009 bill in the Philippines proposed granting him honorary citizenship.
• After Daniel Inouye's death in December 2012 he served two weeks as Hawaii's senior senator before Mazie Hirono succeeded him.

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This episode explains the Senate maneuver known as the nuclear option. Changing a standing rule formally takes a two thirds vote, but a senator can raise a point of order claiming a rule means something other than its text, and when the chair rejects it, appeal the ruling. Because an appeal on a non-debatable question such as cloture cannot be filibustered, a simple majority can overturn the chair and set a new precedent without rewriting the rulebook. The mechanism was tested in the 1995 Hutchison precedent, when the Senate voted 42 to 57 against the chair over an endangered species amendment, and the 1996 FedEx precedent under Trent Lott. The episode also traces cloture from 1917 to the three fifths rule of 1975 and the 1970s two track system.

Trent Lott is credited with coining the term in 2003. A 2005 standoff over judicial nominees ended with the Gang of 14 deal, but in November 2013 Harry Reid's majority voted 48 to 52 to overturn the chair and allow simple majority cloture on most nominations. Democrats cited 82 of 168 historical cloture motions on nominations coming under Obama, while Republicans argued the D.C. Circuit seats did not need filling. In 2017 Mitch McConnell's majority extended the change to Supreme Court nominees for Neil Gorsuch, and in 2019 post-cloture time for lower level nominees was cut to two hours. The episode presents the arguments each side made without taking a position.

• The plan's earlier internal code name was Hulk.
• Supporters call it the constitutional option, arguing the Constitution requires supermajorities only for treaties and impeachment convictions.
• In 2025 Democrats accused John Thune's majority of using it three times, a charge Republicans disputed.
• In January 2022 a Schumer effort to create a talking filibuster for a voting rights bill failed 52 to 48, with Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema voting with Republicans.
• A 2005 House of Lords ruling described the 1832 threat to create new peers to pass the Reform Act as a nuclear option.

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Hiram Fong was born in 1906 in the Kalihi neighborhood of Honolulu, one of 11 children of Cantonese immigrant Fong Sau Hao, who arrived in 1872 to work Hawaii's sugar plantations. He picked beans for cattle feed at four and shined shoes at seven. He graduated from McKinley High School in 1924, where classmate Masaji Marumoto later became the first Japanese American justice on the Hawaii Supreme Court, then earned degrees from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1930 and Harvard Law School in 1935. He opened his own firm in 1938, adopted the name Hiram in 1942 after missionary Hiram Bingham I, served as an Army Air Forces judge advocate, and became speaker of the territorial House by 1948.

Voted out in the 1954 Democratic sweep, he built Finance Factors, which lent to minority families that banks turned away. When Hawaii became a state in 1959 he won a Senate seat with nearly 53 percent, becoming the first Asian American senator, with backing from the ILWU. He voted for the Civil Rights Acts of 1960, 1964 and 1968, the 24th Amendment, Medicare, and Thurgood Marshall's confirmation. His support for the Vietnam War cost him ground at home, he won in 1970 with 51.6 percent, and he retired in 1976. Family lawsuits later drained his fortune, and he and his wife Ellen filed for bankruptcy in 2003. He died in August 2004 at 97.

• He wrote an amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 calling for federal poll watchers.
• In the 1965 immigration debate he told colleagues Asians made up about six tenths of one percent of the U.S. population.
• In 1964 he became the first Asian American to receive delegate votes for president at a Republican convention.
• He was booed for defending HUD Secretary George Romney.
• He and his family opened a 725 acre botanical garden to the public in 1988.

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Harry Flood Byrd was born in 1887 into an old Virginia family whose fortune had been lost. At about 15 he took over his father's insolvent Winchester Star, which owed its newsprint supplier $2,500, and paid the debt off with daily cash payments. By 21 he was running a 93 mile toll road for $33 a month, and he built a large apple business in the Shenandoah Valley, where squalid conditions for migrant workers later inspired Edward R. Murrow's documentary Harvest of Shame. Elected to the state senate at 28, he fought bond financing for roads, won a libel suit brought by highway contractors, and became governor in 1926 with a strict pay as you go policy and a short ballot that cut statewide elected offices to three.

Through county officials known as courthouse cliques, the Byrd organization controlled Virginia for decades, and candidates needed "the nod" to run. Appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1933, Byrd opposed New Deal deficit spending and declined to endorse Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson or John F. Kennedy. After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 he helped author the Southern Manifesto and led Massive Resistance, under which the state would close schools that integrated. He resigned in late 1965, died in October 1966, and was succeeded by his son Harry F. Byrd Jr.

• He championed Skyline Drive and Shenandoah National Park, which remained segregated for a year after a federal order to desegregate national parks.
• Delegates at the 1944 Democratic convention gave him 89 votes against Franklin Roosevelt without his consent.
• Unpledged electors gave him 15 electoral votes in the 1960 presidential election.
• Prince Edward County kept its public schools closed from 1959 to 1964.
• His statue was removed from Richmond's Capitol Square in 2021, and a Richmond area middle school named for him was renamed.

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Harris Wofford was born in New York City in 1926, and at 11 he traveled the world for six months with his grandmother in 1937, spending Christmas Eve in Bethlehem, walking through Shanghai after its capture by the Japanese army, watching Mussolini announce Italy's exit from the League of Nations, and discovering Gandhi in India. As a teenager he built a national student group promoting world government, and a magazine predicted he would be president. After Army Air Forces service and the University of Chicago, he spent eight months in India with his wife Clare studying Gandhi's methods, became the first white male student at Howard Law School, finished law at Yale in 1954, and became a close adviser to Martin Luther King Jr.

On John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign, Wofford and Sargent Shriver urged Kennedy to call Coretta Scott King after her husband's arrest in Georgia, then spread the story through Black churches. He served as Kennedy's special assistant for civil rights, helped build the Peace Corps, marched at Selma in 1965, led Bryn Mawr College, and was arrested at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Appointed to the Senate at 65 after Senator John Heinz died in a 1991 air crash, he came back from 40 points down to beat former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh by 10 points on a health care message, then lost to Rick Santorum in 1994. At 90 he married Matthew Charlton, and he died in 2019 at 92.

• About two million pamphlets on light blue paper, known as the blue bomb, reached Black congregations the Sunday before the 1960 election.
• Martin Luther King Sr. switched his endorsement from Richard Nixon to Kennedy after the call.
• Lee Iacocca turned down the Pennsylvania Senate appointment before it went to Wofford.
• James Carville and Paul Begala built his 1991 campaign around the line that if criminals have a right to a lawyer, working people should have a right to a doctor.
• He ran AmeriCorps from 1995 to 2001 and introduced Barack Obama before his 2008 Philadelphia speech on race.

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Albert Benjamin "Happy" Chandler was born in rural Kentucky in 1898, and by age three his mother had left the family. By eight he was running paper routes and odd jobs, and he later paid for law school by coaching high school sports. In 1921 he scouted Harvard's practices for a former teammate coaching tiny Centre College, which then beat Harvard 6 to 0. Elected lieutenant governor in 1931, he blocked Governor Ruby Laffoon's sales tax and was stripped of his powers. In 1935, while Laffoon was in Washington, D.C., Chandler used his role as acting governor to call a special session that created a primary election. He won that primary and, at 37, became Kentucky's youngest governor, repealing the sales tax and reorganizing the state government.

After losing a 1938 Senate primary to Majority Leader Alben Barkley, Chandler had himself appointed to the Senate in 1939, where he voted against an anti-lynching bill and against repealing the poll tax. In 1945 he became commissioner of Major League Baseball, moved its headquarters to Cincinnati, and in 1947 approved Jackie Robinson's contract despite owners voting 15 to 1 against integration. Owners removed him in 1951. Elected governor again in 1955, he sent roughly 900 National Guardsmen and M-47 Patton tanks in 1956 to enforce school desegregation in Sturgis and Clay. In 1988, as a University of Kentucky trustee, he used a racial slur in a meeting and declined to offer a real apology.

• His campaign claimed in 1938 that someone from Barkley's side had poisoned his drinking water, and Barkley mocked the charge by pretending to shudder at glasses of water.
• As governor he instituted an income tax, funded free textbooks and paid off the state debt.
• He banned players who jumped to a rival Mexican league for five years, inviting antitrust lawsuits.
• He steered World Series radio and television money into baseball's first player pension fund.
• He backed the threat to suspend St. Louis Cardinals players who talked of striking rather than play against Robinson.

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George Murphy, the only U.S. senator with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, was born on July 4, 1902, in New Haven, Connecticut, to an Irish Catholic family; his father Mike Murphy was a noted athletic trainer. After Yale, Murphy entered films in 1930 as studios sought stage-trained talent for talkies, and he became a leading song and dance man in musicals such as the Broadway Melody series and For Me and My Gal. He acted for 22 years, retired in 1952, and received an honorary Oscar in 1951 without ever earning a competitive nomination. He organized entertainment for troops in World War II, served as Screen Actors Guild president from 1944 to 1946, and held vice president posts at Desilu and Technicolor.

Murphy directed entertainment for the 1953, 1957 and 1961 presidential inaugurations, then in 1964 defeated Pierre Salinger, John F. Kennedy's former press secretary, for a California Senate seat. Ronald Reagan called him his John the Baptist. Throat cancer surgery later removed part of his larynx and left him able to speak only in a whisper. In 1970 he lost to John V. Tunney by more than 600,000 votes amid his health, his support for the Vietnam War, and reports that he still drew a Technicolor salary. He died of leukemia in Palm Beach, Florida, in May 1992, at 89.

• Salinger resigned two days early so Governor Pat Brown could appoint Murphy, giving him seniority over the rest of his freshman class.
• He chaired the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 1967 and 1968.
• He voted for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
• He began the Senate candy desk tradition, now kept by Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin.
• Tunney's campaign inspired the 1972 Robert Redford film The Candidate, and Tom Lehrer wrote a satirical song titled George Murphy.