Ask a lawmaker or anyone who might have been connected to Congress 20 years ago what’s changed most in Washington and they are likely to bemoan a loss of civility, to say they yearn for the good ol’ days when Democrats and Republicans could knock one back or attend bipartisan family dinner parties even after voting against each other. 

Ask a worried person who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris last fall about the state of affairs in Washington and civility is the last thing on their mind. 

Those people don’t want Democrats and Republicans to be friends. They are looking for a resistance movement — for politicians willing to shout, shut things down and, well, get rude. 

Or, like the replies of two people to an X post from Sen. John Hickenlooper declaring that the gutting of NOAA “is wrong,” it’s a simple plea: “Do something.”

Let’s face it, unless someone is a C-SPAN junkie or holding this column in their hands, they probably aren’t as familiar with the limits of minority power when it comes to procedure. And the reality is there are few tools for Democrats to deploy. But if they are truly horrified by the Trump administration, the president’s nominations and the usurping of the legislative branch, there’s no reason for Democrats to seek common ground. 

Think sit-in, along the lines of the June 2016 demonstration on the House floor over gun control. Holds on every nomination. Zero agreements on time or unanimous consent. 

But in just under six weeks of the new administration, the Senate has continued business as usual. 

All Senate Democrats backed their colleague Marco Rubio to become secretary of State. And with very few exceptions, all the other nominees have gotten some degree of Democratic support. Democrats did hold the floor overnight to draw attention to the confirmation of Russell Vought to be the head of the Office of Management and Budget, but President Donald Trump’s nominees have for the most part had easy roads to confirmation.

Back in the day, I regularly covered Netroots Nation, a progressive convention spearheaded by Markos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos. This is a hot topic in the community forums over there. One singled out Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett, Democrats from New York and Texas, as “speaking out fearlessly” while the rest of the party talks strategy in back rooms. 

Another Kos community member who has posted more than 25,000 comments over 20 years under the handle “xaxnar” said they asked their member of Congress to deliver a letter to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. 

It read in part, “Your job one is to make life as difficult as possible for them. It may seem pointless when you can’t stop them from their agenda of destruction but consider this. Every delay you can cause, every bit of energy they must spend responding to you, every time you can get into their heads, that’s a win. It means they have that much less energy to push their agenda through.”

Even the annual question for the opposition party about a presidential joint address to Congress — whether to attend, when to hiss and what accessory might signal solidarity — finds Democrats divided. Axios reported that a Democratic Policy and Communications Committee memo encouraged members to bring guests to Trump’s speech Tuesday who exemplify people hurt by his policies. Still others are urging colleagues to skip it entirely.

As a professor and administrator at the University of Southern California, I have particular interest in education policy. So I watched C-SPAN 2 Thursday as my state’s Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat, said he’d been getting thousands of calls about the nomination of Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education. His constituents “have every right to be concerned,” he said, momentarily banging on his desktop lectern to punctuate his cry that they want him to “Stand up for public education!” Six minutes later, he yielded the floor. I like Padilla, but I couldn’t help but say out loud, “That’s it?” 

For Meredith Shiner, a communications consultant and longtime journalist now living in Chicago, the answer to frustration like this is to “primary every Democrat.”

In a recent column for the New Republic, where she is a contributing editor, Shiner argues that any Democrat running should draw a challenger. “It costs nothing of us other than the mental energy and commitment to be a nuisance to politicians who could stand to be bothered by actual normal people, as opposed to the carousel of donors and consultants who’ve helped bring the Democratic Party to this particular nadir,” she writes. 

The people who earn it will win, she said, and her advice for those who remain is to “Be real. Talk like a person to people who really want to hear someone in this moment say that you have their backs.”

We chatted last week about her push for Sen. Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, to retire. 

We took note, as should you, that it’s probably the most Roll Call thing ever for a former Roll Call editor to interview a former Roll Call reporter for a column in Roll Call. Neither of us can call herself an insider anymore, but I think we’d agree that we both love what Congress is supposed to be. And Shiner and I have each written about our deep feelings and being profoundly shaken after Jan. 6, 2021. 

She closely covered the Senate and knows its rules — and yes, its limitations for the minority. But she also knows that Democrats could skip three-day weekends and run out the cloture clock, forcing late night and weekend votes, even if that might be “more uncomfortable for you in your workplace.”

This time is anxiety-inducing, and “nothing is matching that energy,” said Shiner, who worked in Washington as a reporter for Politico, Roll Call and Yahoo News. 

As for Durbin, her own senator, he has been in Congress for nearly 42 years — roughly equal to the average age of his constituents. As the minority whip and No. 2 Democrat, Durbin should be using every tool he has to stop, or at least delay, the president he voted to remove from office twice, she said. 

Does Shiner really want to step up to that challenge and mount a primary against Durbin, 80, like she teased in the New Republic? She quips, “I’m going to prove that I can be a senator by not answering your question directly and partially evading it.”

And if there are any hints to glean about Durbin, consider that his campaign website at the moment reads like a time capsule: “Contribute now to reelect Dick Durbin in 2020 and help him keep fighting for our progressive values in the Senate.”