Adam Jentleson - Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy

Additional Praise for

With a grasp of history combined with his insider experience and knowledge, Adam Jentleson has written a clear, concise, and compelling book on the history and evolution of the filibuster, and the rise of its abuse and misuse by Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans. Our system cannot operate without a functional Senate. Jentleson gives us the reasons why and a path forward.

Norman Ornstein, coauthor of Its Even Worse Than It Looks and One Nation After Trump

The Senate is now profoundly rigged, with rules that make it easy to pass tax cuts for the rich and to pack the courts for the powerful but allow the minority party to block bills to assist ordinary families. The Senate is now the graveyard for bills to improve health care, housing, education, worker rights, or to tackle issues like criminal justice, immigration, gun safety, or climate chaos. The biggest culprit of this corrupted, paralyzed Senate is the filibuster, which was born out of the determination of white, wealthy, privileged interests to block civil rights for minority Americans. If you want to understand the Senates descent, its potential path back to relevance, and how vital that path is to restoring a government of, by, and for the people, then this book is essential reading.

U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley

The Senate is the epicenter of American political dysfunction: the place where ideas with broad support are sent to die while those backed by plutocrats and extremists are set into law. In this analytically rich yet highly readable insider account, Adam Jentleson shows why todays undemocratic Senate is an affront to the Framers visionand how we can fix it.

Jacob Hacker, best-selling coauthor of Let Them Eat Tweets and Winner-Take-All Politics

KILL
SWITCH

THE RISE OF
THE MODERN SENATE
AND THE CRIPPLING OF
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

ADAM JENTLESON

To Britt, Danny, and Felix

To establish a positive and permanent rule giving such a power, to such a minority, over such a majority, would overturn the first principle of free government.

JAMES MADISON, letter to Edward Everett, August 28, 1830

All that can save you now is your confrontation with your own historywhich is not your past, but your present.

JAMES BALDWIN, How to Cool It, Esquire, July 1968

THE FIRST TIME I SET FOOT IN the Senate Democratic cloakroom, I was a nervous, twenty-nine-year-old staffer, thrilled to be entering the Senates inner sanctum. I had a mental image of the fabled room from Robert Caros magisterial account of Lyndon Johnsons Senate years, Master of the Senate, which my former colleagues had given me as a farewell present after I accepted a job working for Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Caro describes the room as crackling with power and possibility, packed with senators of competing factions eyeing one another warily in anticipation of a momentous vote. More than any other space in the Capitol, the cloakroom is senators private domain. There, they are unbothered by reporters, out of view of the public, surrounded mostly by other senators, and insulated by the unspoken codes of senatorial life. The few staffers in the room are meant to be seen and not heard, to speak only if asked a question. I had been warned about the strict codes of behavior. No phones, no loud conversationsbetter not to talk at all. Like all staffers, I was expected to stand over to the side, out of the way of the senators passing through the cramped L-shaped space.

The cloakroom is the shabby sibling of the illustrious Senate chamber. Preoccupied with the more glamorous of the twowith the chambers sweeping curve, its shiny mahogany desks arrayed in rows, and the viewing galleries ringing it like grandstandsyou could walk past the cloakroom countless times without really noticing it. Windowless, carpeted, and low-ceilinged, with a few brown leather couches and matching, worn armchairs, it looks like the coat-check area of a restaurant that used to be popular forty years ago but now caters to early birds. There is a minifridge. On top of it sit a cheap coffeepot, paper cups, creamers, and sugar packets. The smell of stale coffee lingers. Only a row of antique phone booths evokes past glories. Lyndon Johnson used to stand in the aisle between two booths, clutching a phone from each, stretching the cords so he could talk into one, then turn and shout into the other. Now, senators take their cell phones into the booths to make calls. Walking by, you might catch a glimpse of a septuagenarian senator huddled in one, cell phone to their ear, a binder-clutching staffer stationed just outside, ready to tell them whom to call next, and what to say.

The reason the cloakroom of legend feels like a nondescript hallway today is that what used to be a place where deals were struck is now a place where orders are handed down, the Senates power more like that of a soul-crushing bureaucracy than of a great deliberative body. From the era of civil rights and the Great Society to ours, the Senate has been in a state of steady decline, as the decentralized, open, and relatively obstruction-free institution that the Framers created was transformed into something altogether unrecognizable. Always known for its plodding pace, todays Senate has become utterly calcified. Not all the changes that have shaped the modern Senate occurred within the institution itself. In the 1950s, party affiliation was not always tied to ideology, and bipartisanship thrived amid the endless cross-party combinations that were possible on any given issue. Many conservatives were Democrats and many liberals were Republicans; indeed, the most conservative members of the Senate at the time were Democrats, and some of the most liberal were members of the GOP. With senators casting their votes according to crosscutting regional and ideological alliances more than party loyalty, the most significant issues of the day were commonly decided by bipartisan votes. Today, the nation is largely sorted by party, by ideology, by geography, and more.

But in large part, the Senates decline was set in motion by senators themselves, who found that suffocating the institution with genteel gridlock served their interests. Motivated by their all-consuming desire to protect Jim Crow and building on the work of obstructionists who had come before them, southern senators of the early twentieth century honed a procedural tool to empower, for the first time in American history, a minority of senators to systematically block bills favored by the majority. The Senate sits at the heart of American government, and every bill that becomes a law must pass through it. The Senate also controls the confirmation of every federal judge, from the district courts up to the Supreme Court, along with the confirmations of thousands of positions in the executive branch. By imposing their will on the Senate, the nerve center of American government, a minority of senators found they could impose their will on the entire nation.