Curated playlist

21st-century United States senators

Hillary ClintonAround 1961, a girl from the Chicago suburbs wrote a letter to NASA. Hillary Rodham, later known as Hillary Clinton, wanted to know what she could do to become an astronaut. The reply was blunt. Women were not being accepted into the…
Barack ObamaObama rejected a plan to bomb a compound in Pakistan and sent Navy SEALs instead. The 2011 raid killed Osama bin Laden.
Kamala HarrisKamala Harris raised 81 million dollars in small-dollar donations during the first 24 hours of her 2024 presidential campaign, the highest single-day total of any presidential candidate in history. The race that followed lasted only 107…
Chuck SchumerBob Dole once joked that the most dangerous place in Washington was between Charles Schumer and a television camera. Schumer, a Democrat from Brooklyn, has been a United States senator from New York since 1999. Along the way he has led his…
Joe BidenJoe Biden took the oath as the 46th president of the United States on the 20th of January 2021. At 78, he was the oldest person to assume the office up to that point. The inauguration was a muted affair, shaped by pandemic precautions and…
Ted CruzTed Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, once held the Senate floor for 21 hours and filled part of that time by reading Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss. He has served in the Senate since 2013. A Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz,…
Marco RubioThe New York Times dubbed Marco Rubio the "Secretary of Everything," a nickname earned by holding several government posts at the same moment. Few American officials have ever carried that kind of workload. Fewer still arrived by a road as…
Bernie SandersBernie Sanders delivered a speech in the United States Senate on the 10th of December 2010 that lasted 8 hours and 34 minutes. His target was a tax bill that would extend the Bush-era rates, which he argued favored the wealthiest…
Elizabeth WarrenElizabeth Warren began her bankruptcy research thinking most filers were gaming the system. She found abuse was rare.
Rand PaulRand Paul began speaking on the floor of the United States Senate on the 6th of March 2013, and he did not stop for 12 hours and 52 minutes. The occasion was the nomination of John O. Brennan to run the Central Intelligence Agency. Paul…
Mitch McConnellMitch McConnell won his first Senate race in 1984 by 3,437 votes out of more than 1.2 million cast, a margin of just over 0.4 percent. He was the only Republican Senate challenger to win that year, even though Ronald Reagan carried the…
JD VanceJD Vance once called Donald Trump reprehensible, then became his running mate.
Ted KennedyEdward Moore Kennedy had just lost the fight for his party's presidential nomination. On the 12th of August 1980 he stepped to the podium at Madison Square Garden. His closing words stayed with the hall: "the work goes on, the cause…
Markwayne MullinMarkwayne Mullin carries a name stitched together from two uncles, Mark and Wayne. In 2026 that name landed on the door of the ninth United States secretary of homeland security. He reached the office after a decade as a House member and a…
Daniel Patrick MoynihanDaniel Patrick Moynihan once shined shoes in Penn Station, which now has a train hall named for him.