Adam Jentleson. (2021). Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. Liveright.

Adam Jentleson. 2021. Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. Liveright.

Adam Jentleson, Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. Liveright, 2021.

Adam Jentleson. Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. Liveright, 2021.

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1. • value: American Politics
2. • value: Senate
3. • value: GOP
4. • value: Republicans
5. • value: lbj
6. • value: current affairs
7. • value: Congress
8. • value: democracy
9. • value: Democrats
10. • value: History
11. • value: plutocracy
12. • value: political history
13. • value: filibuster
14. • value: Harry Reid
15. • value: mitch mcconnell
16. • value: chuck schumer
17. • value: minority rule

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Jentleson, Adam
   • bioText: Adam Jentleson is the executive director of Battle Born Collective and a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid. A columnist for GQ and frequent political commentator on MSNBC, he lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.
   • name: Adam Jentleson

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Kill Switch

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With a new epilogue on filibuster battles under the Biden administration
THE CASE FOR ENDING THE FILIBUSTER
"A truly excellent book... blistering and persuasive." —Ezra Klein, New York Times

An insider's account of how politicians representing a radical white minority of Americans have used "the world's greatest deliberative body" to hijack our democracy.

Our democracy is under assault from homegrown authoritarians, with most observers blaming Donald Trump and the Republican Party that submitted to him. Yet as Adam Jentleson shows, the problem not only goes back to the nineteenth century, but is less about the presidency than it is about our nation's most venerated institution: the United States Senate. A revelatory history of minority rule in America as expressed through the Senate filibuster, Kill Switch shows that white conservatives have long relied on the filibuster—which is not featured in the Constitution, and which, as Jentleson demonstrates, the Framers would have opposed—to shut down attempts to create a multiracial democracy. Featuring a new epilogue on filibuster battles under the Biden administration, Kill Switch will remain an essential warning about the costs of empowering this nation's right-wing minority.

• "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." —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
• "Careful and thorough and exacting." —Michael Tomasky, New York Review of Books
• "[An] excellent, surprising new book." —Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Michael Tomasky;New York Review of Books
   • content: Adam Jentleson's Kill Switch is the most exquisitely timed book I've encountered in years. Jentleson's explanation of the filibuster's ignominious roots, and of the mendacious arguments made today by its defenders, is careful and thorough and exacting. Every senator should be forced to read it and then reread it.
2. • premium: False
   • source: Benjamin Wallace-Wells;The New Yorker
   • content: [An] excellent, surprising new book . . . Jentleson is knowledgeable and adept, offering an account of increasingly flagrant obstruction that culminates in the age of McConnell.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Jennifer Szalai;New York Times
   • content: An impeccably timed book. . . . 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. . . . [Jentleson's] 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.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Kathy Kiely;Washington Post
   • content: [L]eading Democrats, including Reid and former president Barack Obama, are pressing for a sweeping rehab of the "home" Biden has found so comfortable. Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy, a new book by Adam Jentleson, makes for a powerful brief on their behalf... a compelling read.
5. • premium: False
   • source: David Frum;The Atlantic
   • content: [A]n important new book... Adam Jentleson offers a harrowing portrait of how anti-majoritarian dysfunction has paralyzed the U.S. Senate... he writes with an insider's knowledge... As the Senate has deviated further and further from majoritarian norms, the House and the state legislatures have followed. Among the great merits of Jentleson's Kill Switch is that it reminds us how recent this trend is.
6. • premium: False
   • source: Lloyd Green;The Guardian
   • content: [P]erfectly timed... authoritative and well-documented.
7. • premium: False
   • source: Julian Zelizer;CNN.com
   • content: [A] powerful historical account.
8. • premium: False
   • source: Jonathan Chait;New York
   • content: [C]harts the rise and repeated mutations of the filibuster... Jentleson assesses the chamber without the institutional nostalgia that tends to infect its alumni. He ably punctures the propaganda its advocates created to defend it (primarily a tool to allow the South from being outnumbered in Congress by the North, first on slavery, and later on civil rights).
9. • premium: False
   • source: Daniel Schlozman;n+1
   • content: [A] well-crafted call for reform... lively and effective... enlivened with war stories... Jentleson's point in retelling the history is to drive a truck through defenders' two leading talking points. First, the filibuster was never about the principle of unlimited debate. That was always a fig leaf for minority power. Second, its effects are not symmetric; no reason to cool it on reform because the shoe will eventually be on the other foot. Democrats want more from the federal government and need legislation to enact it.
10. • premium: False
    • source: Library Journal, starred review
    • content: Informative and timely... A startling read that will provoke tough questions about governance, this is highly recommended to all interested in government reform.
11. • premium: False
    • source: Publishers Weekly, starred review
    • content: Engrossing... Jentleson skillfully clarifies many arcane legislative procedures and brings a wide range of historical episodes to vivid life. Readers will be galvanized to make the issue of Senate reform a priority.
12. • premium: False
    • source: Ezra Klein, New York Times bestselling author of Why We're Polarized
    • content: In Kill Switch, Adam Jentleson has created both an essential portrait of a Senate—and a political system—in crisis, as well as a crystal-clear analysis of how to save it. Combining prodigious research with the experience of serving at the right hand of Harry Reid, this is a necessary book for understanding why the Senate has become the key impediment to governance in America. Every member of the US Senate should read it, and so should the rest of us.
13. • premium: False
    • source: Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
    • content: Kill Switch is a damning account of how a tool honed to maintain white supremacy has come to cost us all. After reading Jentleson's book, you'll understand why President Obama called the filibuster a Jim Crow relic, and you'll want to join the movement to end it, for the sake of our economy, our democracy, and our planet.
14. • premium: False
    • source: Harry Reid, former U.S. Senator and Senate Majority Leader
    • content: Adam Jentleson is a creature of the Senate...
15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from November 23, 2020
      Jentleson, who served as deputy chief of staff to former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, debuts with an engrossing primer on modern-day congressional gridlock. Frustrated by Republicans who had been using the filibuster at an unprecedented rate to obstruct President Obama’s Cabinet-level and judicial nominees, Reid invoked the so-called “nuclear option” in 2013 and changed Senate rules so that only a simple majority, rather than a three-fifths supermajority, was necessary to end debate on presidential nominees. (Legislation still requires a supermajority.) Citing Merrick Garland’s thwarted Supreme Court nomination and a gun control bill that failed to pass despite the support of 55 senators and 90% of the public, Jentleson argues that Senate rules empower “a minority of predominantly white conservatives to override our democratic system.” His suggestions for reform include doing away with supermajority requirements except where they’re mandated by the Constitution, fixing filibuster rules to revive “real debate,” and democratizing how Senate majority leaders are chosen. Jentleson skillfully clarifies many arcane legislative procedures and brings a wide range of historical episodes to vivid life. Readers will be galvanized to make the issue of Senate reform a priority.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      December 4, 2020
      

      Jentleson's informative and timely work chronicles the history of the Senate and delves into the inadequacies of this legislative body. Given that this book is written by a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid, one might throw out the hypothesis due to partisan lenses. But Jentleson, public affairs director at Democracy Forward, takes care to trace the key points in the development of minority rule as well as legislative tools associated with it, from the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to the 2018 midterms. Unlike a bill, readers will not get lost within the legislative process in this comprehensive yet accessible account. What emerges is a picture of how the filibuster and cloture rules and the centralization of power within the political party leader's hands create the tools that Senator Mitch McConnell has effectively used during his time as Senate Majority Leader. However, Jentleson deftly explains how both parties are at fault in terms of quashing majority viewpoints. In the prolog, the author suggests practical ways the Senate can be reformed to prevent and undo gridlock. VERDICT A startling read that will provoke tough questions about governance, this is highly recommended to all interested in government reform.--Jacob Sherman, Univ. of Texas at San Antonio

      Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      March 1, 2021
      Provocative portrait of a dysfunctional--by design, it seems--U.S. Senate. The Senate has been in a long state of decline, writes Jentleson, public affairs director at Democracy Forward and former deputy chief of staff to Sen. Harry Reid. That fall was "set in motion by senators themselves, who found that suffocating the institution with genteel gridlock served their interests," especially during Jim Crow, when obstructionism was a handy technique for blocking civil rights legislation. However, when Jentleson arrived at the Senate, those tools "had come to be applied to all Senate business." Don't like a piece of impending legislation? Invoke the filibuster, which was not meant to be used by the Senate in the first place--and particularly not as Mitch McConnell and company have honed it down to be, so that the stand-your-ground-and-jabber filibuster of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington has been replaced by one in which a senator doesn't even have to be present on the floor. By this means, along with advancing requirements for supermajorities when simple majority rule ought to hold, the Senate of the last 20 years has managed to avoid accomplishing almost anything--and the minority is definitely in charge, as it was in 2009, when Senate Republicans represented only 35% of the U.S. population. "The most fundamental characteristic of democracy--the idea that majority rule is the fairest way to decide the outcome of elections and determine which bills become law--is baked into our founding ideas and texts," argues Jentleson, but that's not the way it works, and that explains the continuing stranglehold of McConnell--whose major legislative achievement seems to have been to define corruption as requiring "only a direct, quid pro quo exchange"--even now that he's no longer the majority leader. The author proposes reforms, but given all he's outlined here, they seem unlikely ever to be heard. An astute and maddening account of a broken institution and, in turn, a broken democracy.

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

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With a new epilogue on filibuster battles under the Biden administration
THE CASE FOR ENDING THE FILIBUSTER
"A truly excellent book... blistering and persuasive." —Ezra Klein, New York Times

An insider's account of how politicians representing a radical white minority of Americans have used "the world's greatest deliberative body" to hijack our democracy.

Our democracy is under assault from homegrown authoritarians, with most observers blaming Donald Trump and the Republican Party that submitted to him. Yet as Adam Jentleson shows, the problem not only goes back to the nineteenth century, but is less about the presidency than it is about our nation's most venerated institution: the United States Senate. A revelatory history of minority rule in America as expressed through the Senate filibuster, Kill Switch shows that white conservatives have long relied on the filibuster—which is not featured in the...

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   • description: History / Modern / 21st Century
2. • code: POL003000
   • description: Political Science / Civics & Citizenship
3. • code: POL006000
   • description: POLITICAL SCIENCE / American Government / Legislative Branch