A particularly useful section rediscovers the role of Jesse Helms, the hate-filled North Carolina Senator who often paralyzed the Senate, not so much with filibusters, but with endless homophobic and racist amendments and procedural moves. Jentleson’s chapter about Reid, a fascinating politician, soft-spoken and strategically brilliant, adds a compelling personal narrative and shows the Senate through the complex choices of a leader who wanted to respect the institution’s traditions and his colleagues, but who was also determined to get past McConnell’s endless obstruction of President Obama’s policies and nominees. The filibuster is part of that story, but far from the whole of it.
But in the scaffolding around this timely policy argument there’s a much more complex story about the Senate as an institution and its role in American democracy. Calhoun and its deployment to delay civil rights legislation for many decades, while at the same time showing that the filibuster-as-supermajority is not rooted in the structure or any original conception of the Senate and has been changed often, Jentleson makes an entirely persuasive, historically sound, well-researched case. In tracing the filibuster back to its roots in the pro-slavery pretextual political theory of John C. Its author spent the first months of 2021 making the rounds of MSNBC panels to make that case to the already-convinced. Because the book arrives at a moment when the legislative filibuster is the hinge on which voting rights and most of President Biden’s agenda after the American Rescue Plan (passed through a tortured budget procedure that requires only 50 votes) depends, Kill Switch has been read mostly as an extended case for filibuster reform. Mark Schmitt reviewed Kill Switch, Adam Jentleson's book on the Senate filibuster, for Democracy Journal.
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