‘Kill Switch’ details a very broken Senate
According to lore, George Washington came up with the metaphor of the Senate as a “cooling saucer,” tempering the House’s blazing hot cup of tea. It’s an apocryphal story, but an evocative one nonetheless, casting the Senate as a fail-safe institution whose work is invariably carried out with wisdom and patience.
More typically, though, the Senate is deployed as a bluntforce weapon — that, at least, has been the argument from a growing chorus of Democrats as they prepared for the Georgia runoffs last Tuesday.
Now Adam Jentleson, who served as a senior aide to former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, has written an impeccably timed book about the modern Senate using a different metaphor. In “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy” (325 pages, Liveright, $26.95), Jentleson explains how
“the world’s greatest deliberative body” has come to carry out its work without much greatness or even deliberation, serving instead as a place where ambitious legislation goes to die.
There is, of course, the structural imbalance baked into the institution itself: Electing two senators per state, regardless of population, has meant that Republican senators since 2000 have only ever represented a minority of Americans — even when Republicans have controlled a majority of the seats. But Jentleson says that it’s ultimately the filibuster that has endowed those Republican senators with formidable powers of obstruction. “The filibuster,” he writes, “has mainly served to empower a minority of predominantly white conservatives to override our democratic system when they found themselves outnumbered.”
A partisan
Jentleson is explicitly a partisan in this fight, and in “Kill Switch” he doesn’t pretend to distance himself from the action to give the view from 10,000 feet. But his intimacy with the Senate turns out to be his book’s greatest strength. Jentleson understands the inner workings of the institution, down to the most granular details, showing precisely how arcane procedural rules can be leveraged to dramatic effect.
The book is divided into two parts: The first traces the rise of the filibuster in the 19th century and its use in the early 20th century, particularly in maintaining Jim Crow; the second follows the fate of the filibuster after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Republicans eager to preserve the filibuster have talked about it with such reverence that it’s easy to forget it only appeared after all of the Constitution’s framers had died. Long-held norms against “superfluous debate” meant that even after the Senate got rid of a rule that limited debate in 1806, it was several decades before John C. Calhoun deigned to wield extended speechifying as a political tool, making high-minded appeals to the principle of minority rights.
Not just any minority, though. “Calhoun deployed his concern for the underdog only to help the overdog,” Jentleson writes. The South Carolina senator’s soaring rhetoric about minority rights revolved around protecting the interests of wealthy slavers in the South and their vision of white supremacy. It’s not for nothing that historian Richard Hofstadter called Calhoun “the Marx of the Master Class.”
A facilitator
Jentleson ably narrates this history, with all of its ironies and unintended consequences. In 1917, the Senate introduced Rule 22, allowing senators to call a vote for cloture — to end debate — but only if they could muster a supermajority of twothirds (a threshold that has since been lowered to threefifths, or 60 senators). The supermajority threshold was the result of a compromise in the Senate — “a reasonable thing to do at a time when Senate norms still compelled minorities to eventually yield to the majority,” Jentleson writes. But as those norms degraded over the ensuing decades, Rule 22 placed the onus on supporters of a bill to whip up not just a majority but a supermajority in order to end