[Tapper:] Welcome back to "THE LEAD." I'm Jake Tapper. In another politics news, for any of you who ever wished that you could just ship lawmakers to a deserted island, well, congratulations, you got your wish. In a new Discovery Channel show called rival survival, one Democratic senator and one Republican senator get dropped off on a deserted island where they are expected to actually work together to get things done.
[Unidentified Male:] You're lying again and it's not right.
[Tapper:] With fierce battles for territory.
[Unidentified Male:] You're pure talk and you take no action.
[Tapper:] Thundering political storms.
[Sen. Mitch Mcconnell , Kentucky:] The Senate has reached a new level of dysfunction.
[Sen. Harry Reid , Majority Leader:] Senator McConnell and his so- called rule have blocked the majority of the Senate.
[Tapper:] And an uncertain fate for its inhabitants, the U.S. Senate is a real jungle this election season.
[Unidentified Male:] That's as rotten as Martin's ideas on Social Security.
[Tapper:] So in an earnest attempt to get out of this political jungle, rival Senators Martin Heinerick and Jeff Flake went to an actual jungle to see if negotiations were any easier there.
[Unidentified Male:] That's what it comes with, stooping down and licking water out of palm fronts.
[Tapper:] For its new TV show "Rival Survival," Discovery Channel filmed the duo during their week of isolation, complete with struggles to build shelter to forage for food.
[Unidentified Male:] Republicans are better at killing and Democrats are better at eating.
[Tapper:] And to achieve compromise.
[Unidentified Male:] It brought down the cost of Medicare.
[Tapper:] Washington, D.C., is about as far as you can get from the remote Marshal Islands, but the senators say being so far removed helped put things in perspective back home.
[Sen. Jeff Flake , Arizona:] Your priorities change out there pretty quickly to what's most important and back home in the Senate and what's most important is getting legislation to the floor and actually voting on it.
[Unidentified Male:] Not getting it done on the island is not an option and that's a good perspective to have.
[Tapper:] To be fair, these senators actually get along. In fact, it was the lawmakers, not TV executives, who came up with the idea to go where no senators had dared to go before.
[Blake:] It was one of the most effectively kept secrets in Washington. Anybody associated with a member of Congress always looks to protect them from the unforeseen and there are just too many unforeseens here.
[Tapper:] One of the hardest parts of their island mission was planning it.
[Blake:] Sometimes it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission and this is one of those cases where we felt strongly not only about sort of the adventure, but more importantly about the message that, you know, we can disagree and still work together. Boy, if you could have found some water I would have voted for any of his bills.
[Tapper:] Of course, no one on the ballot this Tuesday would be caught with coconut on his or her face, but some members of Congress may actually learn something from their colleagues' adventures at sea.
[Blake:] Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid, if they were to go there and if they were to survive a week like this together we could really move legislation. If they weren't able to survive, we could move legislation even faster.
[Tapper:] The critics' take on the show, well, about as low as Congress' approval ratings. Many critics say the senators are too darn polite with each other for this to really count as reality TV. They can now see it, they can now smell it. They can now hear it from their windows. The 2,000-degree lava, searing its way toward a community of 1,000 people on the Big Island of Hawaii that's making everything in its path just disappear. In the past 24 hours it's even gotten closer and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it from pretty much vaporizing anything it touches. Our Martin Savidge took a trip over the lava flow Marty.
[Martin Savidge, Cnn Correspondent:] Jake, right now you can see that we're going through rain, not uncommon actually on this side of the island. They get about 140 inches a year so we're diverting around the weather, but we're still following lava into Pahoa, and it brings up the point that if the rain can somehow slow it down or have an impact? It was a question I posed to a volcanologist and he made it clear that rain is not going to have an impact on this, super-heated stone coming from far underground. The lava tends to travel underground anyway. So what's happening on the atmosphere doesn't have much of an impact. It does help in an indirect way. The vegetation around here remains super saturated so it prevents any kind of major brushfire and that's a good thing. You don't need another disaster on top of the one you're dealing with Jake.
[Tapper:] Martin Savidge, thank you so much. That's it for "THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper. I now turn you over to Wolf Blitzer. He is next door in "THE SITUATION ROOM" Wolf.