Calhoun deigned to wield extended speechifying as a political tool, making high-minded appeals to the principle of minority rights. Long-held norms against “superfluous debate” meant that even after the Senate got rid of a rule that limited debate in 1806, it was several decades before John C.
Republicans eager to preserve the filibuster have talked about it with such reverence that it’s easy to forget it only appeared after all of the Constitution’s framers had died. “The filibuster,” he writes, “has mainly served to empower a minority of predominantly white conservatives to override our democratic system when they found themselves outnumbered.”Īdam Jentleson, whose new book is “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.” Credit. But Jentleson says that it’s ultimately the filibuster that has endowed those Republican senators with formidable powers of obstruction.
There is, of course, the structural imbalance baked into the institution itself: Electing two senators per state, regardless of population, has meant that Republican senators since 2000 have represented a minority of Americans - even when Republicans have controlled a majority of the seats. 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. Now Adam Jentleson, who served as a senior aide to the former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, has written an impeccably timed book about the modern Senate using a very different metaphor. More typically, though, the Senate is deployed as a blunt-force weapon - that, at least, has been the argument from a growing chorus of Democrats preparing for the Georgia runoffs on Tuesday. It’s an apocryphal story, but an evocative one nonetheless, casting the Senate as a fail-safe institution whose work is invariably carried out with wisdom and patience.
According to lore, George Washington came up with the metaphor of the Senate as a “cooling saucer,” tempering the House’s blazing hot cup of tea.
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