I moved to Washington as a young reporter during the George W. Bush Administration. The city was midway through a transformation that has been a half century in the making, from a half-stuffy, half-scruffy provincial city whose music scene, which everyone praised, took place at approximately two venues, to one of the wealthiest cities in the wealthiest country in the history of the world. You could see the imperial capital bursting through the old provincial trappings everywhere you looked.
The transition was in the monolithic condos going up in Columbia Heights, and the brownstone conversions on the edges of Capitol Hill, but mostly it was in the vast, impenetrable glass towers that were rising in northern Virginia and housed aerospace and defense and logistics corporations—the contractors building the infrastructure for the war on terror. There seemed to be new cranes, and a new, massive, reflected-glass office complex every time I drove out to Dulles, like northern Virginia was aspiring to be a little suburban Dubai. It was an exciting time to be in Washington, but it was the kind of excitement that sent a chill down your spine. I used to walk down Sixteenth Street to work, and every few weeks I’d see a van drop off a dozen or so middle-aged men in full military dress (the mustaches, the epaulets, the intent look—the whole caudillo vibe) at an ornate mansion that housed a think tank with an obvious relationship to the Department of Defense.
I was in my mid-twenties, and it seemed to me that much of the coverage of Washington missed the point—at least, it missed the scale. The coverage centered on Capitol Hill, where the argument was about what new programs to authorize. But the budget of the federal government was then about two and a half trillion dollars, the vast majority of which was renewed each year, with little discussion or oversight. This money, spread among agencies and contractors and think tanks and seeded in creepy caudillo mansions on Sixteenth Street, funded an empire, full of the most expansive and fascinating projects you could imagine. Two failing wars were underway, involving hundreds of thousands of people, whose leadership was constantly changing strategy and tactics and aims, without direction from Congress. Beyond that was the spectre of the globe-spanning war on drugs, decades old and basically undiscussed on Capitol Hill. Perhaps the best resourced effort to defeat disease in human history was occurring at the National Cancer Institute, a division of an agency so peripheral it was located in a suburb. There was a project underway to test the educational achievement of all fifty million public-school students in the United States, and then evaluate them, and then use that information to somehow improve their education. Another was trying to persuade working-class women to marry. Some of these plans were heroic, and some of them so obviously counterproductive they seemed crazy. But when I looked for the people who really knew those programs—their champions, executors, theorists, and reformers—it was very rare that I could find any of them working in Congress.
It was easy enough to see why most journalists in Washington were focussed on Capitol Hill: Congress was public in a way that imperial Washington was not, and its debates were politically legible, and its characters had an interest in winning attention and being on television. But still it seemed out of whack. The staffers were really young, and mostly did not know very much, and neither did many of the senators or congressmen. Many of their offices spent an absurd amount of time raising funds or trying to influence other elections: one ambitious young congressman I wrote about then had devoted himself to making sure his favored candidate became the president of the College Republicans. Now and then a young reporter who had spent some years on the Hill would grow jaded, and write a goodbye-to-all-that column that chastised the Senate for becoming corrupt, or too divided or sclerotic to function. I tended to appreciate these columns, but also thought they somewhat missed the point. It was like writing a piece closely observing the manners of the corporate dining room at Goldman Sachs and concluding that nobody in America made anything anymore. You were just looking in the wrong place.
Then, in 2005, the Bush Administration tried to privatize Social Security. If a lot of what came out of Congress seemed unimportant, then this seemed bad. Bush’s main strategist, Karl Rove, had been talking for years about banishing the New Deal from American life, and his wartime President had just won reëlection (the only Republican victory in the popular vote in the past three decades)—this was the point of maximal conservative ambition since the Reagan Administration. Even among Republicans there was some resistance, but the possibility that the measure would become law was real. The day before the State of the Union address, in which Bush spoke extensively about the need to privatize Social Security, the Senate Minority Leader, Harry Reid, told reporters, “President Bush should forget about privatizing Social Security—it will not happen.” The 2004 election had left Democrats with just forty-five seats (including one Independent, who caucused with them). How could Reid be so sure? As the Los Angeles Times put it, “It takes 60 senators to break a filibuster and force a vote on a bill; Republicans number 55 in the chamber.” It took months, but Reid was proved right. Republicans were never going to get sixty votes, and eventually the project died.
From this I took two lessons. The first was that the Senate might matter more than I thought. The second was that the filibuster, in a capital dominated by increasingly conservative politics, was a force for good. I still believe one of the two.
Adam Jentleson, the author of “Kill Switch,” a new history of the Senate, started working as Harry Reid’s communications director in 2011. By then, Democrats had won and then lost the House and held a slim majority in the Senate, and Mitch McConnell had begun to use the filibuster to stall not just major pieces of legislation but minor and mundane ones: From 1941 to 1970, the Senate took only thirty-six votes to break filibusters, but in the two-year period from 2009 to 2010 they took ninety-one. Taking in the Senate as a Reid staffer, Jentleson noticed how little was accomplished: politicians spoke to empty chambers, progress on bills was “utterly calcified,” even the storied Senate cloakroom, where Lyndon Johnson once turned his close-talking personal aggression into legislative progress, now looked like “the coat-check area of a restaurant that used to be popular forty years ago.” The central act of Jentleson’s five years with Reid was the Majority Leader’s choice, in 2013, to “go nuclear”—to react to persistent Republican stalling on judicial nominations by passing a party-line vote exempting judicial nominations from the filibuster. Jentleson regards this decision as not just heroic but as an act of necessary revolution against the antidemocratic tyranny of the Senate.
Now Jentelson works for Democracy Forward, a good-government group, and, in his excellent, surprising new book, he offers his full account of the Senate’s futility. It is centrally a history of the filibuster, which, in Jentleson’s view, has for nearly all of its life span been a tool to stall social progress. “It is the Senate,” Jentleson writes, and its procedures, “that sits at the heart of our era of minority rule.” His book has far more villains than heroes, the final one being Mitch McConnell. He quotes McConnell attributing to George Washington the image of the Senate as a “cooling saucer,” placed underneath a teacup: “The tea is going to slosh out of the saucer and cool off. Nothing happens quickly in the Senate.” This is the kind of thing that makes Jentleson apoplectic, both because it is probably apocryphal (he traces its history to an 1884 column in Harper’s) and because it is forthrightly anti-majoritarian. The Founders might have wanted the Senate to be less responsive to popular whims than the House, he concedes, but none of them envisioned a body that would require a supermajority to pass legislation; he persuasively quotes Thomas Jefferson (“It is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail”) and Benjamin Franklin (“A system where ‘the minority overpowers the majority’ would be ‘contrary to the Common Practice of Assemblies in all Countries and Ages’ ”). To Alexander Hamilton, any rule that required a supermajority vote served “to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”
The slow turn to a corrupt junta begins with John C. Calhoun, a Democrat from South Carolina, who in Jentleson’s history is the first great villain of the filibuster. Jentleson credits Calhoun with realizing, during an 1841 fight over chartering the Bank of the U.S., that the Senate had no way to formally end debate. Believing that such a bank would threaten the South’s economic power, Calhoun organized Southern senators and sent them to the floor in a weeks-long train, offering amendments that all got voted down, hoping to delay the vote past the summer adjournment. When Henry Clay, a Whig from Kentucky, tried to amend Senate rules to establish a vote to end debate, Calhoun “invoked the loftiest of principles to cast Clay as a tyrant,” Jentelson writes. In the end, the debate ended, and the bill passed; Calhoun didn’t have the votes. But he kept at it through the long run-up to the Civil War, using stalling tactics and invoking the language of minority rights to try to stave off, among other things, a bill to establish a territorial government in Oregon because it opposed slavery. Calhoun’s strategy became part of the South’s political heritage. Turn the page to 1891, or 1954, and you find Southerners opposing civil-rights legislation in the language of high principle. Calhoun had discovered, as Jentleson puts it, “a bug in Madison’s code.”
This bug became institutionalized in 1917, after the pacifist Senator Robert La Follette, a Wisconsin Republican, staged a two-day filibuster of a bill to arm U.S. Marine ships, embarrassing the Wilson Administration and the Senate, which were set on entering the First World War immediately. The Senate responded by voting 76–3 to adopt Rule 22, which established that debate could be ended by a two-thirds vote. Jentleson’s great modern villain, the politician who figured out how to use this rule, is the Georgia Democrat Richard Russell, “a handsome man with an aquiline nose and a patrician gaze,” who made it his lifework to defend racial segregation, proposing a bill that would have provided financial incentives for Black Americans to leave the South. During the postwar period, Russell weaponized Rule 22 to kill federal anti-lynching and anti-poll-tax legislation, and, perhaps most significantly, to gut a comprehensive civil-rights bill that, as Jentleson puts it, “a majority of the House, a majority of the Senate, and a popular Republican administration supported.” The method became so effective that, according to a 1951 account of civil rights by a writer for the Saturday Evening Post, Washington reporters called the Southern caucus “Dick Russell’s Dixieland Band.” The Post also noted the Georgia senator’s insistence on euphemism: “The Negro, who is at the heart of the Civil Rights issue, is never mentioned.”
There aren’t many flaws in Jentleson’s book, but one is that, in his focus on the Senate, he often loses sight of the country beyond. He credits a 1954 manifesto written by the segregationist senators with spurring the anti-civil-rights program of “massive resistance.” But that program had been underway, in different forms, since Reconstruction—for nearly a century, white Southerners had organized campaigns of terror and intimidation, and had devoted themselves to a terribly inefficient economy in order to defend racial separation. Russell’s use of Senate rules was imaginative and deeply damaging, but massive resistance was coming with or without him. The problem wasn’t only Senate procedure. It was also the racism of the people that Russell represented.
But when it comes to the Senate itself, Jentleson is knowledgeable and adept, offering an account of increasingly flagrant obstruction that culminates in the age of McConnell. As Senate Minority Leader for almost the entirety of Barack Obama’s Presidency, McConnell used the filibuster much more often than anyone had before, on even the most uncontroversial votes. (According to Jentleson, those nominations on which McConnell “routinely” placed an indefinite hold ended with not a single vote against.) But McConnell followed a deep pattern, adopting the proceduralism and genteel and euphemistic rhetoric that had characterized Southern resistance for two centuries. Without directly trying to, Jentleson suggests an answer to an of-the-moment political mystery: How was it that such a dry and uncharasmatic figure as Mitch McConnell could have so successfully ground American politics to a halt? The conventional account—that he mastered the Senate’s rules—doesn’t seem quite enough. Jentleson provides a more persuasive theory: McConnell was just following a long history of conservative politicians who had learned how to manipulate the Senate’s rules. He is a talented mimic.
Let’s say that Jentleson convinces fifty senators, as fully as he’s convinced me, that Senate obstruction has gone too far, and that they vote—as they can, with a bare majority—to change the chamber’s rules and abolish the filibuster. Then what?
One version is that, with the conservative grip on legislation loosened, an ambitious progressive program will flower. Jentleson notes that, without “filibuster-induced paralysis,” the Biden Administration can act decisively on climate change, the racial-wealth gap, and restoring the protections of the Voting Rights Act. Writing on a similar theme just after the Inauguration, the Times columnist Ezra Klein suggested not only that abolishing the filibuster would be the only way to enact President Biden’s agenda but that enacting that agenda was the only way for Democrats to keep their majority and stave off a resurgent Trumpism. Klein lamented that some Democrats seemed to prefer “decorum” to “democracy,” and favored preserving the filibuster: “If they choose that path in 2022, they will lose their majority, and they will deserve it.”
I’m less sure that such a progressive consensus exists or that Senate procedure is powerful enough to forestall it. If the country is coming around to support aggressive action against climate change and inequality, it isn’t really voting like it. For two decades the Democrats have steadily demanded more expansive solutions to those problems, Republicans have grown more adamant in opposition, and the votes have stayed just about fifty-fifty. If such a consensus did exist, you’d expect to see Democratic senators calling for the abolishment of the filibuster, but they’ve generally been cautious. Two moderates, Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, have said outright that they will oppose any effort to break the filibuster. During the Presidential primaries even some of the most liberal senators, including Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders, equivocated. Biden himself said he was opposed to abolishing the filibuster, and last month his press secretary, Jen Psaki, said that “the President’s position hasn’t changed.” The Democrats are aware that they have other options for passing legislation. (They have been signalling that they are willing to pass a $1.9-trillion recovery package that includes a universal fifteen-dollar-per-hour minimum wage on a party-line vote through budget reconciliation if needed—that’s not a small loophole.) They are also behaving like they remember the role that the filibuster played in preserving Social Security, and how easy it would be for Republicans to capture a Senate majority in 2022. They are not acting as if they are sure that the people are on their side.
But there is another, quieter reason to believe that the country would be better without a filibuster, even if you doubt that a progressive golden age will ensue. It’s one I came to favor not by experiencing the stasis and disappointments of Obama’s second term, as Jentleson did, but by watching the chaos of Donald Trump’s. During the past decade, Republican candidates were able to make radical and unrealistic promises—that Obamacare would be overturned and replaced with something better, that political opponents would be jailed—because they understood that no one would hold them to account. American government is so divided by law and by party that you can always blame your political opponents. During the first two years of Trump’s Administration, Republicans, suddenly in control of the White House and Congress, took few major legislative actions. They agreed to cut taxes for the wealthy, and they could not agree to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They choked. It isn’t surprising, in the end, that a party that had grown so practiced at promising its voters what it had no plans to deliver should fall victim to Trump insisting he had won an election he lost. Conservative politics have become almost wholly symbolic. Abolishing the filibuster would go a small way toward restoring some reality to them. Go ahead, voters would say to new majorities. Give us what you promised. Let’s see what you’ve got.
