Make the Senate Great Again

It's behind a paywall so I can't read it. But has the Senate ever really been great?

Robert Caro's Master of the Senate discussed the history of the institution in some detail. My takeaway from the book: The Senate basically never really worked as it was intended. The Senate was designed to be more deliberative than the House, and to slow down the pace of political change, primarily by having longer and staggered terms for Sentators and giving them a lot of negative power: the ability to vote down legislation even if the house wanted to pass it. But throughout American history it seems to have slowed down things far too much. The only time it worked was when LBJ was majority leader. Once he left the Senate it reverted to being the bottleneck for political change yet again.