Book: Senate has failed in its fail-safe role
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 blunt-force weapon — that, at least, has been the argument from a growing chorus of Democrats.
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 very different metaphor. In “Kill Switch,” 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 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.”
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.
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. Longheld 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 highminded 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.
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 two-thirds (a threshold that has since been lowered to three-fifths, 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 debate and get to a vote.
In “Kill Switch,” McConnell is expressly portrayed as a 21st-century version of Calhoun — infinitely blander, less extravagantly fanatical but more coldly efficient. One gets the sense that McConnell wouldn’t necessarily disagree with Jentleson’s assessment of how the Senate fundamentally operates; it’s just that he and his fellow Republicans find the filibuster useful to a conservative agenda, which generally has more to do with stopping legislation than advancing it.
Against the wisdom of the ages, you can tell a book by its cover. You can usually tell one by its title, too.
“Summerwater” is Sarah Moss’ new novel. Her title is taken from the “The Ballad of Semmerwater,” a poem by the Englishman William Watson (1858-1935). It suggests density and perhaps difficulty, in the manner of the word “riverrun,” which appears in the first sentence of “Finnegans Wake.” As titles go, it’s mildly pretentious.
Yet Moss, except in flashes, is anything but a pretentious writer. She writes beautifully about English middle-class life, about souls in tumult, about people whose lives have not turned out the way they’d hoped.
She catches the details of ordinary existence in a manner that’s reminiscent of director Mike Leigh: the peeling roof tiles, the cheap plastic teakettles, the beans on toast. She never condescends, and her fluid prose is suggestive of larger and darker human themes.
Reading her, one recalls John Barth’s comment that the best literature is “both of stunning literary quality and democratic of access.”
Moss was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and teaches at University College Dublin. This is her seventh novel. Her previous one, “Ghost Wall,” is about a family on a twoweek academic reenactment, in the manner of American Civil War reenactments, of Iron Age culture and rituals. That book has an ominous undertow and a certain greatness.
“Summerwater” is a bit less tightly wound than “Ghost Wall,” and it has an expedient ending. But there’s little doubt, reading Moss, that you’re in the hands of a sophisticated and gifted writer.
Her new novel is set in a vacation park in Scotland over the course of a long, cool, oppressively rainy day in August. The park is on a loch in the middle of nowhere, at the end of a 10-mile singletrack road.
People are stuck in their cabins. There’s no