Book Review: "Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy"

Adam Jentleson's bracing new history of the Senate is a wake-up call regarding the world's greatest deliberative body

It’s no secret that the United States Senate is, in a word, broken. Though this has been the case for quite some time—ever since Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky announced that the goal of his caucus was to make Barack Obama a one term president—it’s become increasingly clear with each passing year and each legislative debacle. Even as I write this, there is consternation among many on the left that the Republicans in the Senate—joined by moderate Democrats Joe Manchina of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona—will become significant stumbling blocks to President Joe Biden’s ambitious legislative agenda. Given the obstruction that his COVID relief bill has already faced, there are increasing calls, particularly from the left, to abolish the filibuster and use this new opportunity to push through a raft of rprogressive legislation, ranging from a new voting rights act to a raise to the minimum wage. 

As Adam Jentleson reveals in his new book, Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy, this state of affairs didn’t come out of nowhere. In fact, it is the logical endpoint to decades, even centuries, of efforts by the minority to exert its dominance of the majority, often in direct defiance of the wishes and intentions of the Founders (particularly Alexander Hamilton and James Madison). The result is a chamber that doesn’t adequately represent the country, primarily because the Constitution’s guarantee that all states have equal representation in the Senate is ill-equipped to deal with the increasingly vast population differences between the largest states (such as California) and the smallest (such as Wyoming).

Just as importantly, as Jentleson points out, there have always been those who yearned to make the minority more powerful than the majority, and, throughout the 19th and 20th century, these individuals have been fixated on the issue of race. In the 19th, John C. Calhoun played a pivotal role in creating the filibuster that we know today, and in the 20th powerful southern Democrats used their positions as heads of Senate committees to stifle, or at the very least defang, civil rights legislation. In their capable hands, the filibuster became a very powerful weapon of obstruction, and it only grew more so as the 20th century progressed and Republicans saw it as an effective weapon with which to destroy any and all Democratic legislative priorities. 

At this present moment, the filibuster has become, in some ways, an empty signifier. Senators who wish to use it as a threat to derail legislation rarely, if ever, have to see it through, since just the specter of unlimited debate is enough to do the job. The fact that an actual filibuster is quite a rarity these days makes it all the more ridiculous that even popular legislation—such as Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill—must either pass with 60 votes or through reconciliation (which requires just a majority). In the hands of the ruthless McConnell, as Jentleson documents, the filibuster has become a very potent force, even as it is also one of the most toxic aspects of our current political machinery. 

Indeed, McConnell, and Republicans generally, become a key villain in the second half of the book, and it’s not hard to see why. It would be easier to credit their use of the filibuster as motivated by some sort of genuine concern for representing their constituents if they were able to or interested in passing their own legislation. However, as Jentleson trenchantly argues,McConnell is actually very bad at getting legislation passed.

It’s important to point out that the current problems plaguing the Senate can’t all be laid at Republicans’ door (even if McConnell and his enablers have exacerbated the dysfunction). Indeed, it was two prominent Democrats who did a great deal to change the way that the chamber was run, centralizing power in the hands of the majority leader. In the middle of the 20th century, one Lyndon Baines Johnson, the man who would eventually become JFK’s VP and then president in his own right, showed himself to be one of the canniest and most ruthless political operators of his time, bending the chamber to his will. At the beginning of the 21st, Harry Reid of Nevada did much the same. While Jentleson goes to great pains to show how their efforts were to some degree justified, he’s not afraid to point out that these changes have made it easier for men like McCconnell to continue breaking the norms when it’s to their advantage to do so.

These structural developments within the Senate were occurring at the same time as American political culture was changing around them. Most notable was the effect of negative partisanship, in which one’s party allegiance was determined less by what said party stood for than by whether that party was able to defeat the other side. Combined with structural issues such as the filibuster and the centralization of power in the hands of majority leaders, it’s easy to see how the Senate has gone from being the nation’s greatest deliberative body to one of its most dysfunctional. 

I was struck as I was reading how effortlessly Jentleson manages to weave together the macro and micro developments, so that we’re able to see how individual people fit into the broader scope of history. What’s more, his willingness to take on Harry Reid is especially notable, given that he was actually a staffer for the former majority leader. As tempting as it is to lambaste Republicans for their mendacity and their willingness to destroy norms and traditions in their pursuit of power, it’s important that we hold our own leaders to account as well. 

Nor is Jentleson content to simply diagnose the problems currently afflicting one of the two most important legislative bodies in the world; he also provides a number of proposals for helping to fix the problems. Among his solutions are reforming (or abolishing) the filibuster, democratizing leadership and restoring debate (since remarkably little debate actually occurs in the Senate). If the Senate refuses to engage with the basic challenges it confronts, then the future of our fractured republic looks very bleak indeed.