Red, blue, black and white ... old, young and ageless beauties ... practically everyone seems united in their disdain for Washington gridlock.

And exhibit No. 1 in a lot of people’s indictment of the system is the U.S. Senate, where legislation goes to fester.

Now Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., is on the inside track to maybe — just maybe — do something about it.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has appointed Lankford to a special Senate task force to explore changes in Senate procedures, including possibly scaling back the power of the filibuster.

Senate rules are frustrating. They intentionally empower minorities and deliberately slow the process of legislation. Ideally, that forces consensus and compromise, but Washington stopped being an ideal world long ago.

“The Senate is supposed to be the most deliberative body in the world — that’s the name it has earned over the years — but we can’t even get on to the bills to deliberate,” Lankford told me last week.

Senate procedure largely relies on unanimous consent: All 100 members have to agree to do something before they do it. Shall we start debating a bill? Everyone OK with that? Shall we stop debating now? Everyone on board?

If even one senator isn’t happy with the idea, the process balls up. It takes a supermajority — 60 votes — to push through a senator’s hold on most actions, and in the closely divided partisan atmosphere of the upper chamber, that can mean everything stops.

Lankford’s predecessor, U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, was a master of shutting down the Senate. A physician by training and stubborn by nature, he earned the nickname of Dr. No for his willingness to stand (often alone) against popular ideas, especially those that didn’t fit in his reading of the Constitution.

Here’s the thing about filibusters: Everyone hates them when it’s their ox being gored, but they love them when it’s that damned ox from next door that’s constantly breaking down the fence and lunching on mother’s vegetable garden.

Lankford is no Coburn, but he has used holds himself. He’s one of two senators currently blocking progress on reauthorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which he concedes has broad bipartisan support. Over the past 50 years, the fund has provided about $17 billion for national park and forest expansion, but Lankford has held up its consideration. He wants the federal government to concentrate on managing its current property instead of expanding. He thinks he could get majority support to amend the bill to his liking, but, as with so many things in Washington, confrontations come down to all or nothing — and in this case, nothing gives Lankford more leverage.

Multiply that by 100, throw in several armies of lobbyists and a 24-hour news cycle, and you have what we have: gridlock.

“It’s not just a behavioral problem,” Lankford said. “It’s a structural problem.”

There are solutions, but eliminating the filibuster and going to a simple majority to conduct all Senate business isn’t likely or right.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said. “I don’t think you’re going to get that genie back in the bottle.”

Lankford goes into the study with no preconceived solutions, but some of the ideas he’s heard discussed include exempting certain actions (opening debate on appropriation bills, for example) from the filibuster process, reducing the number of cloture votes needed to pass a bill, and eroding the leverage of senatorial holds by lowering the supermajority needed to proceed over the course of time.

The timing for those kinds of changes might be good. Control of the Senate is up for grabs in the 2016 election, and both sides have an interest in making operations more effective and manageable.

In 2013, when the Senate was in the control of Democrats, Majority Leader Harry Reid forced through the last significant filibuster modification, a rules change to allow judicial nominations to forge ahead with a simple majority. Unlike that effort, Lankford wants any rules changes that come out of the task force to be approved in the old-fashioned Senate fashion, meaning at least 67 senators will have to be on board.

“That’s a high hurdle,” he said. “But I think we can get it done.”