KILL SWITCH

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 Smith Goes to Washington has been replaced by one in which a senator doesn’t even have to be present on the floor.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.