Outstanding. If I were still teaching AP Government, I would be looking for funding to buy copies for my classes and make it required reading. ( )

So informative. I like to think I'm a well-educated voter but I learned so much from this book about the history of the Senate.

Jentleson makes a strong case for the abolishment of the filibuster, that it has been used to block progress many more times than to stop harm and that in its current form reduces the Senate to a body that merely votes along primarily party lines with little or no debate.

Highly recommended. Reading level is around college freshman level, this is not an academic book. ( )

Jentleson hits the proverbial nail on the head and identifies the source of the cancer:

The tool that white supremacist senators honed in the Jim Crow era to defy the majority is the filibuster, as we know it today. [...] From John Calhoun, the antebellum father of nullification who argued, on the Senate floor, that slavery was a “positive good,” to Richard Russell, the post–World War II puppet master of the Senate who swore that “any southern white man worth a pinch of salt would give his all to maintain white supremacy,” to Mitch McConnell in our own time, who declared that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” southern senators invented the filibuster, strengthened it, and developed alternative histories to justify it.

Alternative histories to justify it. Yeah. They're good at that. "Benjamin Franklin wrote that a system where 'the minority overpowers the majority' would be 'contrary to the Common Practice of Assemblies in all Countries and Ages.'” And yet, here we are.

Recommended by my friend, this is not a long book but may take a bit longer than expected if you drill down the notes and sources, and if you, like me, take breaks to let the mind heal. If you think for yourself, this will infuriate you. If, however, you like to watch a certain “News” Channel and get all tuckered out not thinking… well, it’s likely to make you mad as well because the senators you probably support are deeply complicit in the dysfunction of the Senate. Not completely to blame, of course, but largely responsible. It’s not just the Senate; the parties’ demographics played a significant part. (Note: What was once “Democrat” in the South now prominently aligns with Republican, so it is not the party, but the players).

[I]n 1968, Nixon returned to American political life with a very different approach, using Democrats’ support for the civil rights bills Johnson passed as president to draw racist white voters—those for whom studies showed that maintaining racial hierarchy was an acute motivating factor in their political choices—away from Democrats and into the GOP. Nixon’s strategy worked, and the conservatism Republican senators represent today, laced with racist undertones (and under Trump, overtones), is its legacy.

Overtones. Understatement, that.
It may be tempting to cry oversimplification, but the indicators are all there: “According to a 2019 New York Times analysis of data collected by the Manifesto Project, a group that tracks party-policy positions around the globe, the modern Republican Party is more extreme than Britain’s Independence Party and France’s National Rally party, both of which are far-right populist parties that verge on neofascism. ” And far-right… far anything, left or right, to be fair … is ripe for totalitarianism. Still, that isn’t quite an applicable spectral division… far right adherents seem to be more cohesive, with dogmas attracting “predominantly white, anti-choice conservatives serving wealthy interests” (Jentleson’s analysis), while far lefts seem chaotically diverse at best. And while the southern senators have been largely responsible for the minority rule of the filibuster, the power of the Majority Leadership came out of Lyndon Johnson's machinations, and Reid's grip, handing McConnell an easy tool for extreme obstructionism and destruction. While he minority leader and deliberately blocking the democratic republican process of debate on a background-checks bill, “[McConnell ...] found time to introduce a resolution celebrating the recent March Madness triumph of the University of Louisville men’s basketball team (he’s a big fan). But on the leading proposal for the federal government’s policy response to the massacre of twenty first-graders, the leader of the opposition contributed a grand total of two minutes of floor debate.
McConnell’s performance was the rule, not the exception, as most members of the minority followed his lead. In a debate that stretched over a week, the forty-five senators who opposed the background-checks bill spoke for a grand total of two hours and twenty-four minutes. All but a few minutes’ worth of this “debate” came in the form of prepared speeches, read to a mostly empty chamber.

Madison's vision of majority rule was undermined in his lifetime:

In 1834, less than two years before he passed away at his home in Montpelier, Virginia, Madison engaged the topic once more, writing, “We must recur to the monitory reflection that no Government of human device, and human administration can be perfect; that that which is the least imperfect is therefore the best.” The “abuses of all other governments have led to the preference of Republican Government,” as “the best of all governments because the least imperfect.” Madison concluded, “The vital principle of Republican Government is the lex majoris partis, the will of the majority.”

[author's italics]

Jentleson lays the background and then

The story of the Senate through the 1960s was, in large part, the story of a white supremacist minority’s struggle to acquire veto power through the filibuster. Once they did, it was hard to use, and was only consistently deployed to maintain the oppression of black Americans—since that alone provided sufficient motivation. The second half of this book brings in the story of the Senate today, showing what happened when the filibuster was streamlined so that it could be used against any (and in recent years, every) issue, by leaders wielding unprecedented top-down control, awash in dark money, in a country more polarized than ever before.

And that polarization manifested as pure spite obstruction with the election of President Obama

More often than not, Republicans had a clever rationale for why they were blocking a given nominee, and sometimes daily news coverage strained to capture the scale of the obstruction. But it is clear that by any measure, the level of obstruction Obama faced was historic and unprecedented. All other presidents combined had endured a total of eighty-two filibusters against their nominees. But from 2009 to 2013, President Obama alone faced eighty-six.

All other presidents combined... Freaking obstructionists.

The modern Senate can be boiled down to McConnell's obstruction. And he had help. For his first senate campaign

With his prospects looking grim, McConnell decided to put himself in the hands of Roger Ailes. At the time, Ailes was a TV consultant, making ads for Republican candidates. McConnell wanted an ad that would shake up the race, he told Ailes, and suggested positive ones that would introduce him to voters. Ailes shot them down. “Do you want to look nice, or do you want to take out your opponent and win this thing?” Ailes asked. “I want to do what it takes,” McConnell replied.

Vile. Later, before the tragedy of what would be the results of the 2016 election, McConnell said “I want the American people to be comfortable with the fact that the Republican House and Senate is a responsible, right-of-center, governing majority.” Now that is laughable. On healthcare, he directed that no Republicans support the bill so as to prevent any claim to "bipartisan" - "In what was once the 'world’s greatest deliberative body,' a complex policy issue governing 15 percent of America’s economy was boiled down to a binary political calculation. 'If he [Obama] was for it,' as former Republican senator George Voinovich said, 'we had to be against it.'"

Jentleson says in his conclusion, How to Save the Senate

McConnell did not transform the Senate himself. He had the foresight to open the floodgates to corporate cash, and to use the blockade of Garland to unify the Tea Party base with the GOP establishment. He pioneered the blanket deployment of the filibuster, far beyond anything contemplated by previous leaders. But McConnell followed generations of white supremacist southern obstructionists who had come before him. Ever since John Calhoun set foot in the Senate, they had fought against Madison’s vision of a majority-rule institution, forging new ways to impose their will on a country where progress threatened their power. Under McConnell, the Senate was finally remade in Calhoun’s vision of minority rule. The only question that remains is whether it can be saved.[...]
The filibuster does not just block bills from both sides. It makes white conservatives’ structural advantages, and their ability to impose their will on our diverse majority, self-protecting. To fix our democracy, and to rectify the many injustices within our system today, the first step must be to curtail the filibuster. Senate reform—and democracy reform—starts with filibuster reform.
[...]But the promise of reconciliation is a mirage. Reconciliation is a fasttrack made available by the Budget Control Act of 1974. To use the track, legislation needs to have a demonstrable fiscal impact, and the Senate Parliamentarian judges whether bills comply with reconciliation’s strict rules. The advantage of reconciliation, and its attraction to reformers, is that all provisions that comply with its rules can be brought up for a majority vote.

I do not see this being corrected in my lifetime. More's the pity.

One last note, something else relatively inconsequential in the grand scheme, another quote rubbed me raw: “In total, seventy-one senators voted to invoke cloture. “A lynch mob,” Russell spat on the Senate floor. Later, Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, another ardent white supremacist, wrote to Russell, trying to console him with the reminder that “except for you and your fine leadership,” a strong civil rights bill would have passed long ago”. The Navy named a carrier after Stennis. That's disturbing. ( )

Phenomenal history of the almost 200yr. effort by the southern white aristocrats to subvert progress towards a more equitable country. Starting from the role of Calhoun during a period when some of the original framers of the constitution
where still alive all the way through the centralization of Senate process under LBJ, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell. Jentleson leaves us with a small but critical set of Senate reform recommendations to keep the "minority" from undermining the will of the "majority". ( )

I ended up more confused and less able to understand the filibuster than when I started to read this book. The author has a deceptively accessible style. The book is rooted in history and scholarship and includes accounts of recent events drawing on the author’s participation as a senate staffer. If asked, I would follow all his persuasive advice and practical suggestions, but could never understand the system he wants to change and improve. The book proves that only Americans can admire their system of government.
Delighted to find a proofing error on page 255! The author gets the title of Binder and Smith’s book wrong here - although it is correct in the footnote 15 on page 23. ( )