Book 819: Kill Switch – Adam Jentleson

I heard about this book on NPR’s Fresh Air, and didn’t know quite a few of the facts they shared so immediately reached out to the publisher.*

Jentleson was very open that he had a bias, being a former aide to Democratic majority leader Harry Reid, but I felt he presented all the facts and stories without too much bias. Honestly, I was impressed with how balanced Jentleson was able to talk about everything and ultimately explain Democrats were forced to play the game the southern white supremacist senators have created just to get things done. And it’s irrefutable the line he’s drawn from the slave holders to the January 6th insurrection.

The journey Jentleson takes us on throughout this book is like a slow-motion train wreck that you can’t look away from. We all know the most recent drama with the insanity of this past January, but the decades and decades of drama leading up to it are chock full of WTF moments and “how did the rest of the country not call them out on the blatant racism” (which many did).

In the eighty-seven years between the end of Reconstruction and 1964, the only bills that were stopped by filibusters were civil rights bills. On the rare occasion a non-civil rights bill ran into a filibuster, it eventually passed. Only on civil rights did cloture became a matter of grand principle. (70)

I mean that one sentence alone tells you so much about what the book is about, but then what Jentleson really hits home and brought into a new light for me was the idea of the superminority and the fact that Republicans have held a stranglehold over the US for many decades.

The filibuster has never been the exclusive property of southern reactionaries; as we will see, it has sometimes been deployed by liberals and progressives, and occasionally to historic effect. But from its inception to today, the filibuster has mainly served to empower a minority of predominantly white conservatives to override our democratic system when they found themselves outnumbered, blocking progress that threatened their power, their way of life, and the priorities of their wealthy benefactors, from the slaveholders of the nineteenth century to the conservative billionaires of today. (5, emphasis added)

The voters who fuel Senate Republicans’ minority rule are themselves a minority of the U.S. population. In the twenty first century, Senate Republicans have represented a minority of the population every year, despite holding as many as fifty-five seats, as they did from 2005-2006. At their low point this century, in 2009, Senate Republicans represented just 35 percent of the population. (126)

What kills me, is that there are clearly people who know this and unfortunately it’s not white people. I remember having read articles about it and thinking oh that’s interesting but not really taking it. Whereas many BIPOC know this because they experience, and it is talked about openly and not in hush hush conversations like it is in the white south. I mean take this recent tweet by Representative Ayanna Pressley from Massachusetts:

Republicans tried to overturn the outcome of a democratic election & want to rip away voting rights state by state. They have no interest in passing legislation. They voted against COVID relief.

No more accommodations for white supremacy. Abolish the filibuster so we can govern.

— Ayanna Pressley (@AyannaPressley) June 7, 2021

She’s basically explained what this book is about in one tweet and reinforced what the Republicans are really about:

While progressives tend to be animated by a desire for sweeping change and require large-scale legislation to accomplish their goals, conservatives—standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’—generally do not. Since much of Republicans’ agenda consists of blocking progress while dismantling the regulatory state, it can be accomplished predominantly through filibuster-proof means, such as regulatory rollbacks, executive action, and simply refusing to take action on pressing issues. Republicans certainly have bills they want to pass, but as McConnell found, finding the votes for them is difficult in a party that is more motivated to stop things than anything else, once taxes are cut. (233)

The other two takeaways for me were about Senator Jesse Helms from NC and about the shift of the GOP and Democratic parties into ideological alignment.

I knew he was a powerhouse from growing up in NC, but I didn’t know why or what he’d done to become such. To read about his horrific fundraising practices (see fourth quote in additional quotes), but to also see how he redefined direct marketing was fascinating since I work in nonprofit/higher education direct marketing. I wasn’t proud to see him listed with all the white supremacists that have controlled the senate, but I also wasn’t the least bit surprised.

On the ideological alignment I vaguely remember being taught about it in school, but it was never made so explicitly clear as it was in this book. The way Jentleson spelled it out was so clear and made so much more sense in the broader context of this book. Too bad Texas controls most of the textbooks our country uses because most of this book’s facts will ever make it into today’s schools.

Recommendation: Y’all, this book needs to be read by EVERYONE. If you need an example of what systemic racism looks like then there’s not a clearer example than this. There is definitely some bias in this book with Jentleson’s democratic background, but I felt he did a good job of presenting the facts and also critiquing both parties (historically and currently) of using/misusing various senate tools.

*I received a copy of Kill Switch from the publisher return for my honest opinion. No money or goods were exchanged.

Opening Line: “The first time I set foot in the Senate Democratic cloakroom, I was a nervous, twenty-nine-year-old staffer, thrilled to be entering the Senate’s inner sanctum.”

Closing Line: “The Senate needs to be rescued from its own self-indulgent myths, saved from the twisted, damaging Calhounian thing that it has become, and restored to Madison’s model—a model in which the minority is protected, the majority rules, and the business of the nation moves forward.” (Not whited out as this is a work of nonfiction.)

Additional Quotes from Kill Switch
“From the era of civil rights and the Great Society to ours, the Senate has been in a state of steady decline, as the decentralized, open, and relatively obstruction-free institution that the Framers created was transformed into something altogether unrecognizable. Always known for its plodding pace, today’s Senate has become utterly calcified.” (2)

“In the modern Senate, the rule that empowers the filibuster to stop bills is the rule that was supposed to weaken it. It is called Rule 22, and it is what Republicans used to block the 2013 background-checks bill in the name of further debate, even as they refused to debate it. Early in the twentieth century, well-intentioned reformers created Rule 22 as a tool for ending debate, but southerners bent on preserving white supremacy subsequently reinvented it as a weapon of mass obstruction.” (64, emphasis added)

“In our democracy, power is derived from the people, but structures empower some people over others. The Senate empowers a minority of predominantly white, conservative voters to elect enough senators to block the will of the majority. Over the past few decades, changes in the Senate’s rules have meant that senators representing as little as 11 percent of the population can deliver the obstructionist agenda these white, conservative voters desire, blocking progress across most issues. This dynamic renders these voters abnormally powerful. This group is not just a minority, it is a superminority.” (112, emphasis added)

“What his critics didn’t see, at least not for years, was that [Jesse] Helms turned these failed votes into big victories by feeding them into a grassroots fundraising machine, pioneering techniques widely used today. At the time, the political world had not seen anything like what Helms created . . . the more sensational the message, the more money it raised. Working with Helms gothic worldview, Viguerie used his votes to craft alarmist messages about the decline of American society. ‘Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade school classes that teach our children CANNIBALISM, WIFE-SWAPPING and the MURDER of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior,’ one letter read.” (143)

“In the twenty-five years before McConnell took over as minority leader, Senate minorities filibustered an average of fifty-two times per two-year session of Congress, regardless of which party was in the minority. In McConnell’s first six years as minority leader, he nearly doubled the rate, filibustering an average of ninety-two-times per two-year session of Congress.” (208)