Kill Switch

The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy

By: Adam Jentleson

Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan

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

Every major decision governing our diverse, majority-female, and increasingly liberal country bears the stamp of the US Senate, yet the Senate allows an almost exclusively White, predominantly male, and radically conservative minority of the American electorate to impose its will on the rest of us. How did we get to this point?

In Kill Switch, Adam Jentleson argues that shifting demographics alone cannot explain how Mitch McConnell harnessed the Senate and turned it into a powerful weapon of minority rule. As Jentleson shows, since the 1950s, a free-flowing body of relative equals has devolved into a rigidly hierarchical, polarized institution, with both Democrats and Republicans to blame. The current GOP has merely used the methods pioneered by its predecessors though to newly extreme ends. In a work for fans of How Democracies Die and even Master of the Senate, Jentleson makes clear that, without a reevaluation of Senate practices - starting with ending the filibuster - we face the prospect of permanent minority rule in America.

©2021 Adam Jentleson (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

important story

important story if you do not know it, but we must go further and abolish the Senate entirely

I never realized there was even this much to learn about the Senate.

Great read, well organized, broken down into easily understood sections. Great book. I listened to it in one day.

Fascinating

I really enjoyed this book. Learned a lot. If you have an interest in history, governance, and / or understanding the sh*tshow that is today’s senate, this is for you. Did not love the narrator though. His voice was grating. The book skipped a lot, too.

The filibuster must go

Left leaning but with great historical perspective of how the filibuster came to be. Highly recommend for anyone.

It's the filibuster stupid

This is the best explanation I've seen yet for how the US Senate has become so dysfunctional and undemocratic. Jentleson covers Senate history from its being as intended by Madison and the other founders, through its intentional corruption by John C. Calhoun and then 20th Century white supremacists such as Richard Russell, to today where Mitch McConnell has fully transformed the Senate into Calhoun's dream of superminority obstructionism. Jentleson takes the reader on a fascinating ride through documented repeated subversion of the intention of the Constitutional founders. This book provides a clear eyed view of how the Senate rarely if ever serves the will of the people.

At the center of Senate dysfunction is the filibuster—a word that did not exist in the time of the Constitutional Convention. The filibuster and its associated rules were and are primarily used by conservatives for obstructionist purposes, standing athwart history, yelling Stop—and most good for the people has indeed been stopped. A major difference in our own time is that there is little pretense to anything principled in this obstruction. McConnell's hypocrisy about slowing or accelerating court nominees depending on whether they suit the purposes of his handlers provides a glaring example of larger and deeper corruption in the Senate.

There are several causes for the broken state of the Senate, among them (there is no polite way to say it) conservative senators being held captive by a loud minority with the mindset of Wealthy, White, Anti-choice Conservatives—for which Jentleson uses the shorthand of WWAC—who in turn are manipulated by obscene amounts of dark money unleashed by the Citizens United decision, which is deployed by billionaires in a successful bid to retain their extreme wealth and influence irrespective of the damage this does to society. Any senators that step out of line become the target of this dark money network, which uses deceptive emotional hooks to enrage the WWAC-mindset super minority against them.

Jentleson concludes the book with some practical steps that may be taken to return the Senate to a functional state that existed before Aaron Burr caused removal of the previous question motion. But first there needs to be 51 votes to remove the filibuster—until then we will continue to have a WWAC Senate.