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On the night of Sept. 30, the last day that the U.S. Senate was in session before breaking for fall recess, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen strode onto the chamber’s floor and made an unusual request.

The 79-year-old Democratic lawmaker sought to force a vote to confirm 10 new ambassadors. The nominees weren’t the big campaign donors who typically get glitzy posts in Paris and Rome. They were career diplomats, tapped to represent Washington in places such as Benin, Sierra Leone, Malaysia, and Kyrgyzstan, whose nominations are frequently held up for political horse-trading. And sure enough, despite having had successful confirmation hearings, their nominations had stalled amid partisan fighting.

On the night of Sept. 30, the last day that the U.S. Senate was in session before breaking for fall recess, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen strode onto the chamber’s floor and made an unusual request.

The 79-year-old Democratic lawmaker sought to force a vote to confirm 10 new ambassadors. The nominees weren’t the big campaign donors who typically get glitzy posts in Paris and Rome. They were career diplomats, tapped to represent Washington in places such as Benin, Sierra Leone, Malaysia, and Kyrgyzstan, whose nominations are frequently held up for political horse-trading. And sure enough, despite having had successful confirmation hearings, their nominations had stalled amid partisan fighting.

Fed up with the lack of progress, Shaheen—the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee—made her move. She played the China card. Shaheen gave a speech highlighting the dearth of confirmed U.S. ambassadors while Beijing makes diplomatic inroads around the globe.

As she spoke, she gestured to two world maps juxtaposing where the United States and China have ambassadors. While the map of China’s top envoys appeared to be almost filled out, the U.S. map showcased gaping white spaces across most of Africa, with many other unfilled positions in Latin America, Asia, and Europe. Empty posts in Russia and Brazil loomed particularly large.

U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen points to a map of filled U.S. ambassadorships as Secretary of State Marco Rubio testifies during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Jan. 28. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Shaheen finished her remarks and requested the confirmation of the nominees. None of the other 99 senators objected—an almost unheard-of result in today’s polarized Senate.

“I think this is very uniquely Jeanne Shaheen,” said Naz Durakoglu, the Democratic staff director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime staffer for Shaheen, recalling how other Senate staff for both Democrats and Republicans laughed when they realized what the senator was doing and that she was going to get away with it. “Because she was the one doing it, no one objected.”

Shaheen, who is retiring at the end of the year, has spent nearly two decades on Capitol Hill working in a bipartisan manner to strike modest compromises. That hasn’t always made her popular with the Democratic base, which has been hunting for its own flamethrowers to meet the challenge of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term.

Flamethrower she is not. Rather, Shaheen operates as a conciliator, doing the often-unglamorous work of trying to build consensus. No matter how outraged she may be over Trump’s latest norm-defying move, she always speaks in measured, even tones.

“You can’t just say ‘I’m going to give up.’ You’ve got to keep at it. I believe in persistence,” the senator said during a June interview in her office in the Senate’s Hart Office Building.

In her two final years in office, Shaheen has had to watch some of her signature foreign-policy achievements—such as securing initiatives to advance women’s rights, which she spent years painstakingly building bipartisan support for—come........

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