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Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate…
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Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy (original 2021; edition 2021)

by Adam Jentleson (Author)

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1559175,026 (4.28)None
Excellent history of how the procedures of the senate have been changed over the years. If you are interested in history or government, you will enjoy this book. ( )
  grandpahobo | Apr 2, 2021 |
Showing 9 of 9
Outstanding. If I were still teaching AP Government, I would be looking for funding to buy copies for my classes and make it required reading. ( )
  pollycallahan | Jul 1, 2023 |
So informative. I like to think I'm a well-educated voter but I learned so much from this book about the history of the Senate.

Jentleson makes a strong case for the abolishment of the filibuster, that it has been used to block progress many more times than to stop harm and that in its current form reduces the Senate to a body that merely votes along primarily party lines with little or no debate.

Highly recommended. Reading level is around college freshman level, this is not an academic book. ( )
  Bookjoy144 | Mar 2, 2022 |
Jentleson hits the proverbial nail on the head and identifies the source of the cancer:
The tool that white supremacist senators honed in the Jim Crow era to defy the majority is the filibuster, as we know it today. [...] From John Calhoun, the antebellum father of nullification who argued, on the Senate floor, that slavery was a “positive good,” to Richard Russell, the post–World War II puppet master of the Senate who swore that “any southern white man worth a pinch of salt would give his all to maintain white supremacy,” to Mitch McConnell in our own time, who declared that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” southern senators invented the filibuster, strengthened it, and developed alternative histories to justify it.
Alternative histories to justify it. Yeah. They're good at that. "Benjamin Franklin wrote that a system where 'the minority overpowers the majority' would be 'contrary to the Common Practice of Assemblies in all Countries and Ages.'” And yet, here we are.

Recommended by my friend, this is not a long book but may take a bit longer than expected if you drill down the notes and sources, and if you, like me, take breaks to let the mind heal. If you think for yourself, this will infuriate you. If, however, you like to watch a certain “News” Channel and get all tuckered out not thinking… well, it’s likely to make you mad as well because the senators you probably support are deeply complicit in the dysfunction of the Senate. Not completely to blame, of course, but largely responsible. It’s not just the Senate; the parties’ demographics played a significant part. (Note: What was once “Democrat” in the South now prominently aligns with Republican, so it is not the party, but the players).
[I]n 1968, Nixon returned to American political life with a very different approach, using Democrats’ support for the civil rights bills Johnson passed as president to draw racist white voters—those for whom studies showed that maintaining racial hierarchy was an acute motivating factor in their political choices—away from Democrats and into the GOP. Nixon’s strategy worked, and the conservatism Republican senators represent today, laced with racist undertones (and under Trump, overtones), is its legacy.
Overtones. Understatement, that.
It may be tempting to cry oversimplification, but the indicators are all there: “According to a 2019 New York Times analysis of data collected by the Manifesto Project, a group that tracks party-policy positions around the globe, the modern Republican Party is more extreme than Britain’s Independence Party and France’s National Rally party, both of which are far-right populist parties that verge on neofascism. ” And far-right… far anything, left or right, to be fair … is ripe for totalitarianism. Still, that isn’t quite an applicable spectral division… far right adherents seem to be more cohesive, with dogmas attracting “predominantly white, anti-choice conservatives serving wealthy interests” (Jentleson’s analysis), while far lefts seem chaotically diverse at best. And while the southern senators have been largely responsible for the minority rule of the filibuster, the power of the Majority Leadership came out of Lyndon Johnson's machinations, and Reid's grip, handing McConnell an easy tool for extreme obstructionism and destruction. While he minority leader and deliberately blocking the democratic republican process of debate on a background-checks bill, “[McConnell ...] found time to introduce a resolution celebrating the recent March Madness triumph of the University of Louisville men’s basketball team (he’s a big fan). But on the leading proposal for the federal government’s policy response to the massacre of twenty first-graders, the leader of the opposition contributed a grand total of two minutes of floor debate.
McConnell’s performance was the rule, not the exception, as most members of the minority followed his lead. In a debate that stretched over a week, the forty-five senators who opposed the background-checks bill spoke for a grand total of two hours and twenty-four minutes. All but a few minutes’ worth of this “debate” came in the form of prepared speeches, read to a mostly empty chamber.

Madison's vision of majority rule was undermined in his lifetime:
In 1834, less than two years before he passed away at his home in Montpelier, Virginia, Madison engaged the topic once more, writing, “We must recur to the monitory reflection that no Government of human device, and human administration can be perfect; that that which is the least imperfect is therefore the best.” The “abuses of all other governments have led to the preference of Republican Government,” as “the best of all governments because the least imperfect.” Madison concluded, “The vital principle of Republican Government is the lex majoris partis, the will of the majority.
[author's italics]

Jentleson lays the background and then
The story of the Senate through the 1960s was, in large part, the story of a white supremacist minority’s struggle to acquire veto power through the filibuster. Once they did, it was hard to use, and was only consistently deployed to maintain the oppression of black Americans—since that alone provided sufficient motivation. The second half of this book brings in the story of the Senate today, showing what happened when the filibuster was streamlined so that it could be used against any (and in recent years, every) issue, by leaders wielding unprecedented top-down control, awash in dark money, in a country more polarized than ever before.
And that polarization manifested as pure spite obstruction with the election of President Obama
More often than not, Republicans had a clever rationale for why they were blocking a given nominee, and sometimes daily news coverage strained to capture the scale of the obstruction. But it is clear that by any measure, the level of obstruction Obama faced was historic and unprecedented. All other presidents combined had endured a total of eighty-two filibusters against their nominees. But from 2009 to 2013, President Obama alone faced eighty-six.
All other presidents combined... Freaking obstructionists.

The modern Senate can be boiled down to McConnell's obstruction. And he had help. For his first senate campaign
With his prospects looking grim, McConnell decided to put himself in the hands of Roger Ailes. At the time, Ailes was a TV consultant, making ads for Republican candidates. McConnell wanted an ad that would shake up the race, he told Ailes, and suggested positive ones that would introduce him to voters. Ailes shot them down. “Do you want to look nice, or do you want to take out your opponent and win this thing?” Ailes asked. “I want to do what it takes,” McConnell replied.
Vile. Later, before the tragedy of what would be the results of the 2016 election, McConnell said “I want the American people to be comfortable with the fact that the Republican House and Senate is a responsible, right-of-center, governing majority.” Now that is laughable. On healthcare, he directed that no Republicans support the bill so as to prevent any claim to "bipartisan" - "In what was once the 'world’s greatest deliberative body,' a complex policy issue governing 15 percent of America’s economy was boiled down to a binary political calculation. 'If he [Obama] was for it,' as former Republican senator George Voinovich said, 'we had to be against it.'"

Jentleson says in his conclusion, How to Save the Senate
McConnell did not transform the Senate himself. He had the foresight to open the floodgates to corporate cash, and to use the blockade of Garland to unify the Tea Party base with the GOP establishment. He pioneered the blanket deployment of the filibuster, far beyond anything contemplated by previous leaders. But McConnell followed generations of white supremacist southern obstructionists who had come before him. Ever since John Calhoun set foot in the Senate, they had fought against Madison’s vision of a majority-rule institution, forging new ways to impose their will on a country where progress threatened their power. Under McConnell, the Senate was finally remade in Calhoun’s vision of minority rule. The only question that remains is whether it can be saved.[...]
The filibuster does not just block bills from both sides. It makes white conservatives’ structural advantages, and their ability to impose their will on our diverse majority, self-protecting. To fix our democracy, and to rectify the many injustices within our system today, the first step must be to curtail the filibuster. Senate reform—and democracy reform—starts with filibuster reform.
[...]But the promise of reconciliation is a mirage. Reconciliation is a fasttrack made available by the Budget Control Act of 1974. To use the track, legislation needs to have a demonstrable fiscal impact, and the Senate Parliamentarian judges whether bills comply with reconciliation’s strict rules. The advantage of reconciliation, and its attraction to reformers, is that all provisions that comply with its rules can be brought up for a majority vote.
I do not see this being corrected in my lifetime. More's the pity.

One last note, something else relatively inconsequential in the grand scheme, another quote rubbed me raw: “In total, seventy-one senators voted to invoke cloture. “A lynch mob,” Russell spat on the Senate floor. Later, Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, another ardent white supremacist, wrote to Russell, trying to console him with the reminder that “except for you and your fine leadership,” a strong civil rights bill would have passed long ago”. The Navy named a carrier after Stennis. That's disturbing. ( )
1 vote Razinha | Nov 2, 2021 |
Phenomenal history of the almost 200yr. effort by the southern white aristocrats to subvert progress towards a more equitable country. Starting from the role of Calhoun during a period when some of the original framers of the constitution
where still alive all the way through the centralization of Senate process under LBJ, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell. Jentleson leaves us with a small but critical set of Senate reform recommendations to keep the "minority" from undermining the will of the "majority". ( )
  MadHun | Oct 28, 2021 |
I ended up more confused and less able to understand the filibuster than when I started to read this book. The author has a deceptively accessible style. The book is rooted in history and scholarship and includes accounts of recent events drawing on the author’s participation as a senate staffer. If asked, I would follow all his persuasive advice and practical suggestions, but could never understand the system he wants to change and improve. The book proves that only Americans can admire their system of government.
Delighted to find a proofing error on page 255! The author gets the title of Binder and Smith’s book wrong here - although it is correct in the footnote 15 on page 23. ( )
  mnicol | Jun 5, 2021 |
Although I still feel like the finer points of the filibuster are confusing, I certainly appreciate much more the history and historic abuse of it. Jentleson clearly believes that the Senate needs reform and has some great ideas, including both the end of the filibuster and the reform of the leadership role but I found myself wondering why the Senate can't just be like the House and then wondering why we need the two bodies if they are going to do the same thing? An interesting, deeply researched, and very thought provoking read.
1 vote amyem58 | May 10, 2021 |
Excellent history of how the procedures of the senate have been changed over the years. If you are interested in history or government, you will enjoy this book. ( )
  grandpahobo | Apr 2, 2021 |
A good history of the Senate filibuster. Jentleson makes a reasonable case for strong and meaningful filibuster reform; this book probably should be required reading in Democratic senate offices at this point. ( )
2 vote JBD1 | Feb 7, 2021 |
A fairly interesting refresher on the history of the US Senate. There's quite a big jump made after Johnson's term as Majority Leader—which Jentleseon explains, but is still odd. Given that today's Republicans would rather overturn US democracy rather than lose an election, it seems unlikely that much will change with the Senate or the electoral college, but perhaps some of todays' Senate Democrats will read this and learn something. Ahem.

> Johnson’s maneuvering in the summer of 1957 is rightfully considered a historic feat of personal persuasion, tactical brilliance, and strategic acumen. But only months before, Johnson had defeated an effort that might have rendered much of it moot, along with the gutting of the bill that resulted. By blocking the bipartisan coalition of reformers led by Nixon from reforming Rule 22 in January, Johnson preserved the South’s ability to credibly threaten the civil rights bill with a filibuster, making it necessary to gut the bill and win their cooperation

> Politically, the passage of the 1957 bill completed the third step in Johnson’s plan, making him a hero to many liberals. Within the Senate, it was the accomplishment that gave him the authority to finally stand on his own, apart from Russell. He would need it. Passing the bill with southern acquiescence had allowed him to delay his inevitable break with the “Old Master.”

> All other presidents combined had endured a total of eighty-two filibusters against their nominees. But from 2009 to 2013, President Obama alone faced eighty-six … under President Bill Clinton, unanimous judicial nominees—those who ended up having zero votes cast against their nomination—waited an average of 17 days to receive their confirmation votes. Under President George W. Bush, the wait was 29 days. Under President Obama, it was 125 days

> he started the process of going nuclear. He brought up a vote on a nomination and asked the presiding officer, Senator Patrick Leahy, for a ruling on whether it took a supermajority to invoke cloture. Leahy ruled that it did, since that is what Senate rules stated. Reid then called a vote to overturn the ruling of the chair and it passed, 52 to 48. This method of changing Senate rules was dubbed “the Reid Precedent” by longtime Senate staffer William Dauster. The change executed by Reid and Senate Democrats that day meant that from then on, it would take only a majority to invoke cloture and end debate on most presidential nominations, excluding, for the time being, Supreme Court nominees.

> In the twenty-first century, Senate Republicans have represented a minority of the population every year, despite holding as many as fifty-five seats, as they did from 2005 to 2006

> At thirty-nine million people, California’s population is as big as the twenty-two least populous states combined.

> From 1957 to 1960, as we have seen, Nixon was advocating for strong civil rights bills and leading a largely successful effort to expand GOP outreach to black voters. But in 1968, Nixon returned to American political life with a very different approach, using Democrats’ support for the civil rights bills Johnson passed as president to draw racist white voters

> At a moment in history when the GOP was still relatively liberal on social issues, Helms pushed it to become the culture-warring party we know today

> As the Senate grew and changed, one constant remained: the role of party leader was at best a figurehead. In 1878, the New York Times noted that the Senate had no “distinctly recognized leaders.” … to deal with the challenges of memberships and workloads that continued to grow, Senate Democrats created the formal position of leader in 1920 and Republicans followed in 1925 … This was true until 1952, when Richard Russell anointed Lyndon Johnson as the Democratic leader.

> Johnson exploited Democrats’ insecurity to break the seniority system, convincing the old bulls that the only way they could counter Eisenhower’s popularity and avoid being relegated to permanent minority status was to elevate some of their young stars, like Hubert Humphrey and Mike Mansfield, onto the key committees, where they could gain a national platform and serve as compelling spokespeople for the party. Russell backed the move, and the combination of his support and Johnson’s persuasive powers convinced the committee chairs to let Johnson play a role in doling out committee assignments.

> Early in his tenure as leader, Johnson moved to assert control over the floor schedule and inject himself into senators’ decision-making process. His vehicle was the Democratic Policy Committee, a sleepy backwater that Johnson reimagined as a way to centralize information in the leader’s office—and information was power.

> With his connections to Texas oil barons, Johnson had an enormous reservoir of funds he could distribute at will, at a time when there were few restrictions on political donations. Johnson would dispatch staffers around the country to pick up deliveries of cash, or money would make its way to him in envelopes handed over from lobbyists like Tommy Corcoran, also known as Tommy the Cork. Johnson would then apportion it to senators as he saw fit.

> even after Johnson finished remaking the role of Senate leader into a position worthy of the name, it still had little formal power. In the House, the Speaker controls the all-powerful Rules Committee, which sets the terms for every bill that comes to the floor, from how long debate will last to when and under exactly what conditions the vote will take place. To this day, the Senate majority leader enjoys no such structural control.

> Johnson was miserable in the Kennedy administration, openly despised by the president’s brother Bobby, and finding his Hill Country style an awkward fit in Camelot. “Power is where power goes,” Johnson liked to say, but that was not proving to be true. … he tried maintaining control of the Senate. He asked Mansfield to change the traditional rules governing the Democratic Party caucus to allow him, a member of the executive branch, to preside over the caucus, including sitting in on their closed-door strategy sessions. The deferential Mansfield agreed. When the caucus convened in its private session to elect new leaders, Johnson presided over the election of Mansfield as majority leader. And then he simply didn’t leave. Nor did he cede the leader’s chair to Mansfield. The members of the caucus were shocked, and a polite senatorial revolt ensued

> Until 1980, Democratic control of Congress seemed like a fact of life. Starting in 1955, Democrats held unbroken control of the Senate for twenty-six years. The story was similar in the House, but more extreme: between 1933 and 1995 Democrats controlled the House for all but four years. With control of the majority out of sight, and plenty of points of ideological connection across the aisle, Republican senators also tended to assume Democratic control was impossible to dislodge, and focused more on exerting their influence on policy than trying to take back the majority.

> The process gets its name from the chart that keeps track of what amendments are pending. It’s a piece of paper kept by clerks in the cloakroom, and the chart looks like a tree; the branches are the lines where the amendments are written in. There are a limited number of branches available on any given bill (about eleven). Filling the tree means putting the bill the leader wants the Senate to consider in one slot and placeholders in all the others. The cloakroom keeps these shell amendments close at hand for the leader to slot in when needed. Because leaders have the right of first recognition and get to speak first on any bill, it’s very difficult to stop them from filling the tree, and once it’s filled, it is extremely hard to undo. In his time as leader, Reid shattered the record for filling the tree, using the tool far more than any other leader.

> Reid took control far beyond where even Johnson had been able to push it, and it changed the institution. What had once been a wide-open floor where senators could usually secure whatever votes they sought had become a place where every single vote ran through the leader.

> Reagan’s nomination of Bork was an odd choice. The year before Reagan nominated him, Democrats had gained eight seats in the 1986 midterm elections and retaken control of the Senate. While it was common for the president of one party to ask a Senate controlled by the other party to confirm a Supreme Court nominee, the president usually nodded to political reality by picking a nominee the other party could live with. Asking a Democratic Senate to confirm a radical conservative like Bork was courting trouble, and Reagan got it. … Conservatives’ outrage over Bork’s defeat led to the emergence of one of the most influential institutions of the last four decades: the Federalist Society. The Society was founded in 1982 at Yale Law School, with Bork as its faculty adviser. The Federalist Society’s members saw themselves as “scrappy outsiders who were waging a lonely struggle against the pervasive liberalism of America’s law schools,”

> While he lost his presidential bid to then–Texas governor George W. Bush, McCain’s campaign had elevated his corruption message, and it stuck. Backed by that momentum, he led Senate reformers to finally break McConnell’s filibuster in 2002 and the Senate passed McCain-Feingold, formally known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, by a vote of 60 to 40. President Bush reluctantly signed it into law. Undaunted, McConnell promptly took the law to court—literally. The lawsuit, McConnell v. FEC, went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled for McCain in a 5-to-4 decision, upholding the major aspects of McCain-Feingold and explicitly rebuking the narrow definition of corruption advocated by McConnell. “Plaintiffs conceive of corruption too narrowly,” the majority opinion concluded. “Congress’ legitimate interest extends beyond preventing simple cash-for-votes corruption to curbing undue influence on an office-holder’s judgment, and the appearance of such influence.”

> Using Gold and Gupta’s rationale, Republicans argued that it would be firmly in line with Senate tradition to overturn Rule 22 and end debate with a majority vote—in other words, to go nuclear

> John Roberts sailed through on a 78-to-22 vote. A few months later, Bush nominated the hard-right Samuel Alito. When Democrats threatened to filibuster, Republicans threatened—again—to go nuclear. Democrats backed off, and Alito was confirmed, 58 to 42. The deal looks even worse zoomed out: all of Bush’s far-right nominees were confirmed, but the filibuster was left intact for Republicans to use against President Obama—which they did to devastating effect. That obstruction has already been discussed, but here it is worth noting the enormous political capital that five years of constant obstruction cost Obama before Democrats finally went nuclear in 2013

> by the 1970s leaders were overwhelmed. The tracking system allowed the Senate to process other business during a filibuster by creating separate legislative tracks where other business could move along while one track remained blocked by a filibuster. Because the Senate was able to move on to other issues, a filibuster didn’t attract as much attention as it used to. However, it still blocked the bill it was aimed at

> In 1975, in response to a marathon series of filibusters by Senator James Allen—the segregationist Democrat who had taught Helms how to filibuster—reformers lowered the cloture threshold from two-thirds to three-fifths, or the sixty votes

> The silent filibuster is also a result of leaders coming to rely on what are known as “unanimous consent” agreements, or UCs. … Facing enormous workloads and reliant on UCs, leaders got in the habit of canvassing their caucuses ahead of time to see if anyone objected to a bill or nomination they were considering bringing to the floor. Again, this had a benefit to the leader: it was an early-warning system that alerted them to a senator’s intent to filibuster. But again, it damaged the institution: to deter a leader from moving forward, all a senator had to do was signal their intent to filibuster. This is what is now known as placing a “hold.”

> An early series of regulatory rollbacks was executed using the Congressional Review Act, which established a special category of time-limited legislation that is immune to filibusters (the CRA is not of much use to progressives, since it’s only particularly useful for undoing laws and regulations); the CRA bills passed on simple-majority votes. Republicans’ tax reform bill passed through another special procedure called budget reconciliation, which is also immune to filibusters ( )
  breic | Feb 4, 2021 |
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