Publishers Weekly
★ 11/23/2020
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. (Jan.)
Jacob Hacker
"The Senate is the epicenter of American political dysfunction: the place where ideas with broad support are sent to die while those backed by plutocrats and extremists are set into law. In this analytically rich yet highly readable insider account, Adam Jentleson shows why today’s undemocratic Senate is an affront to the Framers’ vision—and how we can fix it."
New York - Jonathan Chait
"[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)."
New York Review of Books - Michael Tomasky
"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."
New York Times - Jennifer Szalai
"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."
The Atlantic - David Frum
"[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."
CNN.com - Julian Zelizer
"[A] powerful historical account."
The Guardian - Lloyd Green
"[P]erfectly timed… authoritative and well-documented."
Kathy Kiely
"[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."
Senator Jeff Merkley
"The Senate is now profoundly rigged, with rules that make it easy to pass tax cuts for the rich and to pack the courts for the powerful, but allow the minority party to block bills to assist ordinary families. The Senate is now the graveyard for bills to improve health care, housing, education, worker rights, or to tackle issues like criminal justice, immigration, gun safety, or climate chaos. The biggest culprit of this corrupted, paralyzed Senate is the filibuster, which was born out of the determination of white, wealthy, privileged interests to block civil rights for minority Americans. If you want to understand the Senate’s descent, and its potential path back to relevance, and how vital that path is to restoring a government ‘of, by, and for the people,’ then this book is essential reading."
The New Yorker - Benjamin Wallace-Wells
"[An] excellent, surprising new book . . . Jentleson is knowledgeable and adept, offering an account of increasingly flagrant obstruction that culminates in the age of McConnell."
Heather McGhee
"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."
n+1 - Daniel Schlozman
"[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."
Anand Giridharadas
"[A] must-read."
Ezra Klein
"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."
Harry Reid
"Adam Jentleson is a creature of the Senate and no one understands it better than he does. This iconic American institution has been severely damaged by feckless Republican senators who kowtow to every erratic action of Donald Trump. Jentleson understands restoring the Senate to the Framer’s vision as an exceptionally strong deliberative body is essential to restoring our democracy."
Library Journal
12/04/2020
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
Kirkus Reviews
2021-02-08
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 Washingtonhas 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.
