Is the U.S. Senate broken?

The following is a script from "The Broken Senate" which aired on Nov. 4, 2012. Steve Kroft is the correspondent. Ira Rosen, Gabrielle Schonder, producers.

On Tuesday, voters will elect a new Congress, replacing the one that's had the lowest public approval ratings in the history of political polling. Thirty-three seats are up for grabs in the U.S. Senate, which used to be known as the world's greatest deliberative body, a place where difficult issues were carefully considered, and debated until a consensus or a compromise was reached.

Today it's known more for deadlock, dysfunction, and political gamesmanship; a body unwilling or unable to resolve the major issues of the day: jobs, deficits, taxes and how to allocate $1.2 trillion in automatic budget cuts set to go into effect January 1st. A number of respected senators have thrown up their hands and quit, and others are speaking out against an institution many think is broken. One powerful senator had this advice for the voters.

Tom Coburn: The best thing that could happen is all of us lose and send some people up here who care more about the country than they do their political party or their position in politics.

Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is one of the most influential and conservative members of the Senate. He's blocked hundreds of pieces of legislation that he thinks are a waste of money, but he is also one of the few Republicans, or Democrats for that matter, willing to cross party lines to help break the political gridlock that's kept the Senate from dealing not just with big issues but with basic Senate business.

Tom Coburn: This is the first time in 51 years the Senate has not passed a defense authorization bill, which directs where the defense spending going to go, and in terms of the priorities. Our commanders need that.

Steve Kroft: What about a budget?

Tom Coburn: Same thing. We haven't done that in four years.

The inaction certainly can't be blamed on a pressing legislative schedule. Take the week of September 10th, after returning from a five-week vacation, the senators had a Monday night vote and approved a noncontroversial judicial nominee.

Tuesday, their first full day back, there were no hearings scheduled, only a ceremony to honor the 9/11 anniversary on the capitol steps.

The only major piece of legislation to reach the floor that week was a jobs bill for veterans.

[Sen. Jeff Sessions: There are already six programs for veterans now and this would be a new one.]

The bill was defeated.

On Thursday, the senators were headed back to their districts without dealing with issues like the impending budget cuts to 1,000 government programs that will happen January 1st unless the Senate takes action. We did notice that they passed a resolution right before adjournment designating a day to raise awareness for elderly people who fall down.

Olympia Snowe: We should be individually and collectively embarrassed about our failure.

In March, Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, announced that she would not seek a fourth term, citing frustration with the institution. She is one of the last in a nearly extinct group of Senate moderates who championed compromise. The others have died off, been defeated in party primaries or resigned. Snowe decided she could be more effective as a private citizen than as a U.S. senator.

Olympia Snowe: We weren't solving the big problems. And that's what really stunned me--

Steve Kroft: I think the American public is just baffled as to why the Congress not just the Senate, can't get together and come up with some solutions. Why is it?

Olympia Snowe: You know that's a very good question Steve, if you think about the objective of public service it is to solve problems.

Olympia Snowe: We're not dealing with tax reform. We're not dealing with the debt ceiling crisis. We're not dealing with the automatic cuts. We're not dealing with expiration of the tax rates. I finally said one day, you know, "Is there something else we're doing that I'm not aware of?

Steve Kroft: Was that one of the reasons you left?

Olympia Snowe: It is. I mean, we're talking about issues that are looming on the horizon that threaten our well-being as a nation. That threaten our fiscal wellbeing as a nation.

It's not always been this way. The Senate was once a showcase for American political talent and people like Lyndon Johnson, Ted Kennedy and Howard Baker forged alliances with political opponents to pass landmark legislation.

[George H.W. Bush: We've come together in support of a bi-partisan agreement.]

The partisan battles were always resolved behind closed doors. Olympia Snowe remembers how Bob Dole used to do it when he was majority leader.

Olympia Snowe: He would say go to my office at 8:30 in the morning and work it out. He was so intent on making sure that we came up with a solution to the issue that was before the Senate.

Olympia Snowe: We don't know any longer how to work out differences in the United States Senate. We can't get past our differences.

[Lindsey Graham: This is not bi-partisanship

Mark Udall: We've seen roadblock after roadblock

Barbara Boxer: Cause you can do that, that's theatrics. Let me go on and ask you another question.

Lindsey Graham: No it's my turn.]

Evan Bayh: Eventually someone has to say, "enough already. Stop. We're gonna try and do better than this."

Former Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, another moderate gave up his safe Democratic seat and a promising Senate career two years ago. His father, Birch Bayh, had also been a U.S. senator, and he grew up around the institution when it was a more collegial and less partisan place. The two-time governor and one-time Democratic presidential aspirant said he became disillusioned with the Senate when "brain dead ideology" began to take precedence over "principled compromise."

Evan Bayh: Everything is so short-term, politically tactical. It's all, "How do we win the next vote? How do we, you know, win the next news cycle? How do we win the next election?"

Bayh told us he particularly disliked going to the weekly Senate Democratic caucus lunches.

Evan Bayh: And a lot of those lunches are about, "OK, we're a team. We gotta stick together. We gotta beat the daylights out of the other side. We can't afford anybody straying from the team. If you do, that doesn't help us."

Steve Kroft: What happens if you buck the leadership?

Evan Bayh: Well, you buck the party line, there's a price to be paid. What used to be seen as an act of statesmanship trying to forge consensus across the aisle to move the country forward is now viewed by many as a betrayal of your party. So you get senators who vote with their party 95 percent, 98 percent of the time. And they're being run out because some people think, "that's not enough."

Steve Kroft: Why has it been so difficult to compromise?

Tom Coburn: It's leadership. It's pure leadership. When the goal is always to win the next election, rather than to put the country on the right course, whether it's a Republican leading it or the-- a Democrat leading it, the Senate is not going to work.

We wanted to know what Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had to say about all this.

Both have been in the Senate for 25 years, but this was the first time they had ever sat down for a joint television interview. They call each other good friends, and showed up in the same uniform, but they were clearly playing for opposing teams.

Steve Kroft: A lot of people, serious people, think that this institution is broken. Is it broken?

Harry Reid: Our country is in a deep, deep economic problem. We should be doing a lot more than what we've done to address those problems.

Mitch McConnell: Before this Congress is over we will have passed 20 major pieces of legislation on a bipartisan basis. So, clearly-- it is possible to come together. What it's not possible to do any longer is to pass trillion dollar stimulus bills, Obama care, massive debts and deficit. The American people took a look at that, Steve, after two years and said, "Please, stop. We don't want any more of that. We want you to work together."

Steve Kroft: But you haven't worked together. You have lots of important things to consider. Why can't you get together and agree on what to do about these major issues? Why can't you come up with a compromise?

Harry Reid: We've run into a situation here where compromise is not part of what we do around here anymore. Now on your program, 60 Minutes, Speaker of the House Representatives John Boehner said, "I reject the word compromise." That's exactly what he said, my friend Sen. McConnell, 'the single-most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.' And that's what's happened this last year and a half.

Mitch McConnell: Compromise is sometimes very difficult. My 47 members of the Senate have very different views from Harry and his colleagues about how much government we ought to have, how much taxation we ought to have, how much regulation we ought to have. It is not easy to reach agreement when you have very different views, Steve, of the direction the country ought to take.

Truth be told, neither party's done much to resolve their differences and have used every parliamentary trick in the book to obstruct each other's agenda. As minority party in the Senate, the Republican's favorite tool is the filibuster; a tactic older than this Frank Capra movie from the 1930s.

["Mr. Smith Goes to Washington": Half of official Washington is here to see democracy's finest show...the filibuster...the right to talk your head off.]

By holding forth on the Senate floor for days on end, the minority can delay or block bills that have support of the majority.

["Mr. Smith Goes to Washington": Great principles don't get lost once they come to light. They're right here.]

Evan Bayh: A lot of us have seen "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." And Jimmy Stewart's standing up, getting haggard, all-night, in the filibuster to stop some terrible bill. That doesn't happen anymore. Senator's got to pick up the phone and say, "You know what? I'm going to filibuster this thing." Well, that's enough to stop it. He doesn't have to go to the floor and speak all night. There's no physical discomfort involved. So the-- it doesn't really require a whole lot of sacrifice on the part of the individual member to bring the whole thing to a stop.

Under today's rules, any one of the Senate's 100 members can stymie legislation or judicial and executive appointments by simply threatening to filibuster and placing a hold on the bill or the nominee. It then requires a super-majority of 60 votes to proceed and the Democrats have only 53. The Democrats have retaliated by using the rules to block Republican amendments to their bills.

Harry Reid: The Senate, in my opinion, Steve, has been buried in procedural-- a procedural morass.

Steve Kroft: Senator Reid, you are the majority leader in the Senate. You set the agenda for the Senate. You bear a responsibility, just as much of a responsibility as Senator McConnell, to make the system work and to do some things.

Harry Reid: I believe that if you look at what Lyndon Johnson had to do when he was the leader, as I am, it was a different world. Why? You know how many filibusters he had to try to override? One. Me? 248.

Steve Kroft: One of the complaints, and it has been directed at both of you, and both of your parties, is that it's all become about political gamesmanship. It's all become about winning. It's all become about embarrassing the other party and blaming them for the failures of the institution.

Mitch McConnell: The American people are not as interested in the procedural nuances of the Senate as they are the results for the country. And when you step back from this and look at the results over the last four years, the American people give us a failing grade. They don't like what we did.

Steve Kroft: You don't think that people are upset about the fact that both of you can't get together and accomplish things?

Mitch McConnell: I think they're upset about--

Steve Kroft: I think that's one of the reasons right now why your ratings are so low. You disagree with?

Mitch McConnell: I think they don't like the results and I don't blame them. I don't like it either.

All of this is just a reflection of the political deadlock gripping the country and if you are having trouble figuring out who is responsible for the broken Senate, you're not alone.

Steven Smith is a professor at Washington University and one of the countries leading authorities on the history and workings of the U.S. Senate, he says it's all by design.

Steven Smith: If you're in the minority in the Senate, you know that if you can slow down everything. The majority will have less time to get to its entire agenda.

Steve Kroft: To keep the other side from accomplishing--

Steven Smith: To keep the other side. And this is a problem in today's Senate. When the minority blocks a piece of legislation, who does the public blame? Is it the minority for its obstructionism? Or is it the majority that just wasn't willing to compromise enough to find the votes to get the bill passed? How does someone on the outside really know? You really can't know. And so, who are you going to blame?

It seems to suit a lot of senators from both parties who can go home and tell their constituents they stood their ground, even if most of the problems facing the country remain unsolved. That will have to wait until after the election. If you are looking for a bright side to all of this, we leave you with Sen. Coburn.

Tom Coburn: I tell people at home, "You're lucky, we're not in session. We can't hurt you." I mean, you know, one of the positive things about this year being the lowest product-- is we actually-- other-- we're on autopilot as a country. We didn't create a whole bunch of new spending programs. America got-- probably save $5 billion, $6 billion, $10 billion by the fact that we're a "do-nothin' Congress," quote, unquote.

If you're one of the people who is not happy with the current Senate, chances are you aren't going to be any happier with the next. Twenty out of the 22 incumbents up for reelection on Tuesday are expected to be returned to office.