Note: This transcript is machine generated and lightly edited for speaker names.
Senate “institutionalists” claim the filibuster is a traditional US Senate tool that produces compromise. Nope. It’s a tool that was almost never used during the first 200 years of US history. And when it was used it was almost always used to promote a racist agenda. And now that it is used more often, it is used to obstruct and give disproportionate power to Republicans. The first step to eliminating it is understanding it and that is why we talk to veteran Senate staffer Adam Jentleson, author of an important new book “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.” We discuss what has turned the U.S. Senate from “the world’s greatest deliberative body to the place legislation goes to die” and how to fix it.
