By: arielle

On the evening of Jan. 3, Connie Schultz, the Pulitzer-winning syndicated columnist and author, was trying to watch HBO’s Succession, but she kept having to pause it because something reminded her husband of his work. “I am watching #Succession with the chairman of the Senate banking committee,” Schultz informed her quarter-million Twitter followers, “and holy cannoli the ongoing commentary.”

Neither Schultz nor the husband in question, Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, can recall exactly which episode moved her to compose the tweet, which has now been liked nearly 24,000 times. Both believe it was sometime in Season 2—quite possibly one of the episodes in which a curly-haired liberal senator hauls members of the Roy family in front of a Senate committee, about which Brown, a curly-haired liberal, recalls having a lot to say. TIME caught up with Brown this week for a Zoom interview about his take on the show and its policy implications. (Warning: this piece is chock-full of spoilers.)