Volts podcast: Adam Jentleson on how to make the US Senate work

Long-time readers know that I am a veteran hater of the US Senate, the graveyard of good ideas and progressive policies. America’s upper chamber is one of the world’s least productive and most ridiculous legislative bodies, its dysfunctions matched only by its boundless self-regard. Don’t get me started.

Instead, get Adam Jentleson started! Now there’s a guy who has earned his ire at the Senate. As a senior aide to Democratic leader Harry Reid from 2011 to 2016, Jentleson saw up close and personal how the institution’s antiquated rules (especially the filibuster) can be weaponized against reformers.

He shared what he learned in a book that came out earlier this year: Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.

I didn’t want to have Jentleson rehash the book — it has been favorably reviewed and he has been on every podcast under the sun to discuss it — but I was quite interested in his thoughts on the current Senate standoff.

Are Democrats going to let the filibuster prevent them from keeping their promises, improving people’s lives, and getting reelected … again? Are they going to allow a small handful of conservative Democratic senators to squelch a once-in-a-decade chance at legislating … again? Can that still be prevented, and if so, how?

Basically, I asked him to explain Joe Manchin to me. Enjoy.

(Anthony Cheng)

David Roberts

Hey there, welcome to Volts. I'm your host, David Roberts. 

Lots of people these days feel a deep scorn and antipathy toward the US Senate, one of the most dysfunctional and ridiculous legislative bodies in the world. I very much include myself in that number. But few people have done as much to earn their antipathy as Adam Jentleson, who worked in the bowels of the Senate as a Deputy Chief of Staff for Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid from 2011 to 2016 – the fateful final years of Obama's two terms. 

Jentleson got an up close and personal look at all the ways that the rules of the Senate are stacked against reformers, especially the filibuster. He shared what he learned in a new book that came out earlier this year: Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. 

I know that this newsletter is supposed to be about clean energy; I have not forgotten that, I promise. But US democracy is falling apart around us, and it's got me rather preoccupied. So I thought it would be nice to talk to Jentleson, not so much about this in its ugly past, although we will touch on that a little bit, as much as its current politics. What's going on there today, and what can we expect? Basically, I want him to explain Joe Manchin to me. 

So with that, welcome to Volts, Adam.

Adam Jentleson

Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

David Roberts

So as we speak, just a few minutes ago, we found out that the Senate Republicans are in fact expected to filibuster the creation of a commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection. This seems like a straightforwardly reactionary move. You know, as I look back on the last few uses of the filibuster, they seem straightforwardly reactionary. You go back a little further to the 60s and 70s, and it was used in pretty straightforwardly reactionary purposes then. Has the filibuster always been a straightforwardly reactionary tool? Or is there anything that a Democrat could point to and say, “Look, it works for us too!” or “Look, there are reasons for us to support it going forwards.” Has it ever worked for Democrats?

Adam Jentleson

Well, I’m going to give you a yes and no answer there. I think the filibuster was reactionary from the very beginning. It was conceived of as a reactionary tool. It was not supposed to exist – it didn't exist for the first half century or so of the Senate's existence. It came into existence largely to empower, not vulnerable minorities to protect them from being trampled by the mob, but rather to increase the power of already powerful minorities, who wanted to have even more power, and in most cases, to stop the marching progress of the majority.

The number one powerful minority that the filibuster was invented to protect was slaveholders in the antebellum period. We could talk about this more, but it was first just this talking filibuster, and there was no super majority threshold. I think something that's really important to understand, that is easy to get lost because of our bias towards the new, is that the Senate was a majority rule body for most of its existence for 200 plus years. It was really only recently that the super majority threshold, this idea that things need 60 votes to pass, started to become frequently used at all. So all that is to say, that it was reactionary in its invention.

David Roberts

So is it fair to say that all this stuff about protecting the rights of the minority and ensuring the small states have a voice and all that is sort of reverse engineered? The original Senate preceded those rationales?

Adam Jentleson

That's right. I mean, a lot of it is just straight up b******t, but some of it is linked to a grain of truth. It is true that the framers wanted the Senate to be one of the checks that they put in place to protect from untrammeled majority rule. But it was the existence of the Senate that was supposed to be a protection against untrammeled majorities.

David Roberts

It’s already minoritarian in its very structure.

Adam Jentleson 

Exactly. First of all, the decision to have a bicameral legislature instead of a unicameral legislature was one of these checks. Having three branches of government that act as checks on each other was another one of the checks. And then the Senate itself in its entire democratic structure, having every state get the same number of senators was another check. And then other ones, like having senators be elected to longer terms – six years instead of two, having a higher age requirement, and having to be responsive to a broader statewide constituency, instead of just a district. These were all the ways in which the Senate was supposed to play this role as what people talk about as a cooling saucer. 

So when people talk about protecting the minority, you know, they're linking back to this, this grain of truth. But, you know, as you say, it was never supposed to be as anti democratic as it is now. And what people are talking about today is an entirely different vision of this Senate. And it is a vision where the minority has a veto over the majority, which is not what the framers intended at all. 

So I just wanted to say, this is the way in which it's reactionary. It hass been used for these purposes, it has primarily been a weapon to preserve white supremacy. It has occasionally come into use for progressives and for Democrats – one of the most famous filibusters was an anti war filibuster in 1917. That actually led to the creation of the rule that is now the rule that imposes a supermajority threshold. But if you look at it on balance, there's just no comparison. It has always been a tool that is far more powerful, and has had far more effect, for the right than for the left. That’s just the nature of the thing.

David Roberts 

I sometimes hear Democrats say, “Well, there was that one time George W. Bush wanted to drill in Anwar,” and the Democratic Senate filibustered that. So really, it helps everyone?

Adam Jentleson 

You can pick out a few examples over several dozen years. Sometimes, an article pops up by someone defending the filibuster, and they all go the same way, which is, you know, the Democrats should remember that the filibuster helped them. Here's one example. And there are many others. Are there?

David Roberts 

Yeah, name three more!

Adam Jentleson

Yeah, exactly. You know, they usually can't even get to three to make a pattern. I mean, it's just there's no question that it’s the case. The other thing is, if you pull that thread, and you start talking looking at it from a structural perspective, some of these things don't even pan out. For instance, in 1969 and 1970, there was an actual real effort to get rid of the electoral college that was very nearly successful. 

David Roberts

For the same reasons that we hate it today or for different reasons?

Adam Jentleson

I mean, it was slightly different. Between 1888 and 2000, no president ever got elected by winning the Electoral College without winning the popular vote. And then in 1968, they sort of had a brush with the dangerous potential of the Electoral College. So all through the 20th century, the Electoral College was basically an afterthought, because whoever won the popular vote always won the Electoral College. And it was like, “Oh, you know, what's the margin? It's interesting,” but it didn't really factor into people's calculations as much as it does today. Landslide elections were a lot more common back then, because partisanship was looser, all these things. 

So in 1968, George Wallace ran as an Independent, and he got a surprisingly large share of the vote. He came very close to denying either Nixon or Humphrey an electoral college majority. So, after the 1960 election, both Republicans and Democrats were like, “Well, s**t, we shouldn't do that, again. We need to make sure that Wallace can't get momentum.” And so there was a bipartisan effort to get rid of the electoral college. I mean, people forget, but you know, Nixon beat Humphrey by I think it was 0.7 percentage points. It was a very close election and Wallace almost spoiled it. 

So Birch Bayh led an effort to pass a constitutional amendment to get rid of the electoral college, and this was at a time when constitutional amendments actually used to pass. They just passed the 25th amendment a few years earlier, and Birch Bayh had led that effort. So this was actually a thing that happened. He had about 30 states that were ready to ratify it if it had passed. It passed the house, overwhelmingly. It came to the Senate, and he appeared to have the votes to pass the amendment on a two thirds basis, but it was filibustered. It's a little complicated because you already needed two thirds to pass this because it was a constitutional amendment. So the filibuster didn't necessarily raise the threshold for the number of votes that it required to pass this constitution amendment to get rid of the electoral college, but it did complicate the situation and sort of threw a monkey wrench into it. That eventually managed to be the thing that denied Bayh the number of votes he needed. 

So all that is to say, if the filibuster hadn't existed, you talk about George Bush and Anwar in the early aughts, we probably would have gotten rid of the Electoral College in 1970, and George Bush would never have been president. So I know that was a long lead up, but there's your punch line. This is the point, right, is that structurally, it is a tool that advantages conservatives over liberals and progressives: it is a tool that makes it easier to stop things. And we are the side that by and large is the side that is more invested in passing big changes. And so that's why it benefits them more than us.

David Roberts

I'd love to talk more about the history sometime, especially some of the stories you tell about, blocking civil rights bills. One of the things you say in the book that I think is not popularly appreciated, is that the US people – Americans – were ready for Civil Rights way before any laws got passed, because they kept getting filibustered. Like, there was majority support in America to move ahead on civil rights. Long before politically, we were capable of actually doing it. I think people look to things that happen in history, more than they look at things that didn't happen. But if you put on the lens of things that didn't happen and look through American history, it is a tragedy after tragedy, and many of them have the filibuster at the root of it.

Adam Jentleson

That's exactly right. We like to tell ourselves this narrative that, perhaps there was a reason we didn't pass civil rights until 1964 – maybe the country wasn't ready for it. Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader at the time, gave this famous speech paraphrasing Victor Hugo, saying “stronger than any army is an idea whose time has come”. 

But the thing was, America was ready to pass Civil Rights decades before they did. Gallup had anti poll tax bills and anti lynching laws polling in the 60 and 70% range as early as the 1930s and 1940s. There were actual bills that were passing the House that came over to the Senate that had majority support in the Senate; they had presidents of both parties ready to sign them in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. And the only reason the Civil Rights bills didn't pass in the 1920s, and 30s and 40s was because of the filibuster. So if you step back and contemplate the amount of human suffering that was caused by this 30 year delay, it's staggering to think about it. And it makes you a little bit less sanguine about the delay that the filibuster has imposed.

David Roberts

No kidding. 

Well, let's talk about the current mess. So, you know, those of us who lived through the Obama years, have it seared on our memory, that, that he sort of legendarily had a couple of years, not even really two full years, of majorities in both houses of Congress, and then lost the Senate. And then, Mitch McConnell decided before he ever took office, as a matter of course, just to filibuster everything. 

Obama came into office on this wave of hope, and it's a new world and we're turning the page, we're going to do big things, and he wanted to be a historic Reagan-esque President and etc, etc, etc. Instead, he was pretty effectively bottled up, pretty effectively contained to a pretty modest presidency. And Democrats got punished, got their asses kicked at the ballot box, because as Mitch McConnell cannily perceived, if they can't get anything done, the public doesn't know it's the filibuster. They don't know what's going on. They barely know anything. All they see is a bunch of fighting, and finger pointing and nothing happening, and they blame whoever is in charge, and so they blame Dems. 

So basically, McConnell pulled off what is, if you can overlook the evil of it, a really incredibly savvy and effective strategy against Obama. When, last year, Biden came in with majorities in both houses, every Democrat who took to a microphone assured us “We remember what happened to Obama. We are not going to let that happen again, we cannot waste time. We know that the only reason people will vote for us in 2022, or 2024, is if we do things for them, and they're not going to care about the process.” So we're not going to let this happen again. 

Then they sort of passed the COVID relief bill through reconciliation, and Manchin voted for it. And it kind of seemed like, “Oh my god, maybe they did learn the lesson, maybe they are just gonna start doing stuff.” Then we drove into the mud pit. And here we are in the mud pit, doing exactly to a first approximation what happened last time, which is Republicans wasting time on bad faith negotiations, just running out the clock, and then in the end, blocking everything anyway. 

So did Democrats learn that lesson? Are we replaying this whole thing all over again? I mean, I've heard Schumer say so many times now, “We won't let that happen,” but it seems to be happening. So how do we square that circle? Is it happening all over again, or am I being too pessimistic?

Adam Jentleson

I think the jury's out. It's hard to unlearn lessons, and there's reasons that the time ran out on Democrats in 2009 and that they got played the way that they did. It's hard to change some of the fundamental things about the way business is done in Washington. It's hard to reorient senators away from the desire to try to work with Republicans. It's partially for noble reasons, and partially because they're scared, and they like having bipartisan cover. It makes it easier for them to do stuff, and they're often willing to trade away a lot of good policy for that political cover. 

So I think you're right. And look, if you look at the metrics, you could argue that we're behind the pace of 2009 right now. Sorry – it's true. I mean, Biden's approval rating is a lot lower than Obama's was at this time in 2009: Obama was in the 60s, and Biden is somewhere in the low 50s. That's not Biden's fault, necessarily, we're in a more polarized time. He's certainly higher than Trump was. But that's not super great territory to be in, and you can easily see how that would slip into the 40s by the time the midterms rolled around. 

They passed the American rescue plan. But by this time in 2009, they had already passed the Stimulus bill, and the Lilly Ledbetter Act and a bunch of other bills, they passed more bills by this time in 2009, then Democrats have now. So I think there's reason to be concerned. 

You could see a very rapid ramp up in the next month. It looks like Senate Democrats are setting up June to be a decisive month, or at least a very eventful month when it comes to democracy reform and the filibuster.

David Roberts 

Yeah, Schumer just put SB1 [Senate Bill 1] on the schedule, didn't he, just right after this happened?

Adam Jentleson 

Yeah. He said that he's gonna bring it to the floor in the last week in June, and then set up what looks like votes on the Equality Act and background checks, and maybe some other things that might get blocked before then. So it looks like after spending April and May sort of pursuing bipartisanship on some of these smaller-bore bills, that June is going to be the month where things come to a head. 

The reason I say the jury's out is that by the end of June, we could have passed SB1 and reformed the filibuster to do so. And in that case, I would say Democrats would definitely be ahead of the pace of 2009 and do seem to be learning the lessons. Then they would still have the reconciliation process and infrastructure to go in the fall. The other big thing that's coming in the fall is that there's going to be a debt ceiling showdown. There's going to be a government funding fight, which could be a disaster, or could be an opportunity to do big things as well. So there's a lot of variables out there. 

But it is harder to learn the lessons than people think. It's like you're playing baseball, and you see a curveball, and you're like, “Okay, I know what that curveball looks like, I've totally learned my lesson, I'm going to hit it next time.” And then it comes again, and even though you know what it looks like, and you know what you should do, you still can't quite do it. It's harder than it seems to learn the lessons, even if you know you should be learning them. And so I think the jury is still out there for Democrats. 

David Roberts

You have said before publicly several times now that you're sort of a determined optimist. You have said the quest to reform or get rid of the filibuster is happening in phases. And everybody's got this idea basically that Joe Manchin loves bipartisanship, or says he does. So we have to basically go through this bit of theater where Democrats put things forward, and Republicans demonstrate that they're not going to cooperate. They demonstrate it publicly and clearly enough that Joe Manchin sees it, and recognizes it, and realizes that there's no progress possible with the filibuster. So he decides he wants progress more than he wants the filibuster and budges on this. That's kind of the theory of the case. But it's this weird situation where everybody's talking about that being the theory of the case. Manchin himself has surely read in a dozen articles that that's the theory of the case, and that he's going to learn that lesson, and that's what's gonna happen. So it just all seems so surreal from the outside. 

Does Manchin genuinely doubt that Republicans are gonna bottle everything up? And now, they're filibustering the January 6 Commission, which Manchin specifically said is inexcusable. So, insofar as that is the theory of the case, and that the fate of the filibuster is this phased approach to reform or remove it, it seems like this is the phase where Republicans demonstrate that they're not going to cooperate. We demonstrated that. So do we see signs of the next phase?

Adam Jentleson

Well, yes, and no. I'm sorry I keep giving these equivocal answers, but it's part of the nature of the beast when you're dealing with the Senate. I think that we've started that phase of seeing obstruction happen. Manchin has said that this filibuster alone against the January 6 commission bill wasn't enough for him to decide to reform the filibuster. I think that what you're gonna see in June is additional filibusters. Manchin came out in support of the PRO Act, the big pro-union bill, and maybe that will be one of the things that gets blocked. 

So I think we are now firmly in this phase. And the reason it's necessary is that filibuster reform is a momentous change. I obviously think it needs to happen, you think it needs to happen, a lot of your listeners do. But it is a big, big change–it would be the biggest change to the Senate rules, arguably ever, but definitely since 1917. And so you know, to get to a level where members are comfortable making a change of that magnitude, they do need to feel like they have exhausted all other options. 

Now, obviously, that runs up against the fact that we don't have much time; we need to pass these things very quickly. And so that's the delicate balancing act that someone like Senator Schumer has to pull off. And that is, how do you do enough? It's an educational process, so how  do you help Democratic senators go through these life experiences of having Republicans block legislation – it’s like an after school special for senators. 

David Roberts

I've been watching that after school special for a f*****g decade now like. This is what's baffling – this month is going to teach them what the past decade didn't? It just seems so arbitrary.

Adam Jentleson

Here's the additional ingredient you have to throw into the mix, which is that you have to you have to throw in a healthy dose of vanity here, which means that like senators actually think that they can be the ones to overcome this polarized era that we find ourselves in and break through the polarization and be the ones to craft these big bipartisan deals. I don't think very many senators still think that, but I think to a certain extent, Joe Manchin still does. He gave this one interview to CNN about the lesson that he took away from January 6, and he seemed very sincerely to believe that the lesson for him to take away was that he needed to do bipartisanship to show the country that it was still possible for Republicans and Democrats to come together. My takeaway was that the Republicans are an irretrievably Radical Party and that it is incumbent on Democrats to do everything we can to save our democracy before they take back the majority in 2022, but Manchin had a different conclusion. I think he sincerely believes that.

David Roberts

This is one of the big ongoing debates – “What's in Manchin’s head?” You think he is sincere about these things he's saying about bipartisanship, that it's possible that he thinks he can pull it off, that he thinks it's still a possibility. You think like at night, when he's looking at himself in the mirror, brushing his teeth, he really sincerely believes those things.

Adam Jentleson

I think he's the hero of his own narrative, and I think he genuinely believes that he can pull this off. When Harry Reid was in the Senate and I was working for him, Manchin was very critical of Reid and thought he was too hard on Republicans – if Reid hadn't been such a mean guy to Mitch McConnell a bunch of times, there were opportunities for bipartisanship that Manchin could have helped forge. I think this is something he has long believed. But here's the thing: nobody likes to look like a fool. 

David Roberts

He's setting himself up! Every time he says, I can do bipartisanship, and then Republicans kick sand in his face, and he looks like a fool. He seems like he's purposefully setting himself up to look like a fool.

Adam Jentleson

Absolutely, and then the question is, “What does he do at that point?”

David Roberts

“How do you back out?” 

Adam Jentleson

And that's what we don't quite know yet. Exactly. And so, he's made some pretty definitive statements.

David Roberts

If this is the game, and he's, in some sense, aware of it, why does he seem to be going out of his way to make these categorical statements? He seems to be making it very, very difficult for himself to back out of this ever. Why is he doing that?

Adam Jentleson

Well, they're not quite categorical. Even in his Op-Ed, he sort of said to Republicans, you have a responsibility to come forward and engage here. So if they don't, he can put the blame on them. I think the reason you do it is that you want to demonstrate that you really, really, really didn't want to make the change. I don't think this is going to go down as a flip flop. I think this is going to go down as an evolution that will be applauded, not just by the left, but by a broad range of centrist and never Trump commentators who have come to embrace the need for filibuster reform. I mean, you have David Frum, in the Atlantic writing about the need for it. You've got David Brooks talking about it, you’ve got Jennifer Rubin. So it's not who's gonna be mad when he flip flops, I guess, is the question. It's Republicans who yell and scream about it. But you know, he will be hailed, as being in the category of a thoughtful evolution of somebody who really was committed to the Senate and the filibuster, and did everything he could to resist it. But, you know, simply Republicans made it impossible for him. And so I think that's the path there.

David Roberts

While we're peering into people's minds, again, this strategy, and all these dynamics, are being discussed very publicly. So it's not like Manchin’s not aware of them, it’s not like McConnell is unaware of them. So why, if Mitch McConnell knows that Manchin really wants bipartisanship, and it would hardly take anything to keep him on the hook, why is McConnell just demonstrating as clearly as possible to Manchin that he's not going to help? You know what I mean? It just seems like it wouldn't take much for McConnell to keep Manchin, sort of baited on the hook, and he's not even making the mildest effort to do so.

Adam Jentleson

There's a lot of thinking about McConnell that tends to be a little bit too theoretical, because McConnell could do a lot of things that theoretically would be smart for him in the long game. He prides himself on playing the long game – his memoir was titled The Long Game. But the thing is that actually, when you look at it, and look at the record, McConnell really hasn't done anything that has gone against what the Republican base wanted since 2010. 

In 2010, he endorsed a centrist Republican candidate in Kentucky's republican senate primary, a guy named Trey Grayson, and went all in for Grayson and then got humiliated when Rand Paul beat McConnell's favorite candidate in the 2010 Kentucky senate primary. And since that point, McConnell has hewed to whatever the base wants to do at every major juncture. This is clouded by the fact that there's always a wave of coverage and speculation that talks about maybe this is when McConnell is going to, you know, break from Trump or this or that.

David Roberts

He made a sort of gesture that way, right after the insurrection.

Adam Jentleson

He did, yeah, that's right. There was a New York Times story that said McConnell is talking about getting rid of Trump, but then what did he do? He voted to protect Trump in the impeachment. So it's sort of a parlor game. 

But if you want to know where I put my money, it's always on McConnell doing what the base wants. In this case, the base wants there to be no commission. Trump wants there to be no commission. You know, from a cold, political perspective, you could even argue that it's better for McConnell's chance of taking back the majority in 2022 for there to be no commission. 

I think it's not super smart strategically. It certainly does seem to have just set Manchin off since the vote. But I think that McConnell first of all just really doesn't like to get any distance between himself in the base. And maybe he really just thinks that this is better for them in 2022, to not have a commission.

David Roberts

It just seems like the only thing that ever saves Democrats, is Republicans overreaching and stepping on themselves. That's it – that's the one that you can rely on. So Manchin, in some world, I guess I kind of get. He's from a red state. He sort of prides himself on being a negotiator and all this kind of stuff. He's got his own kind of Manchin mythology in his head, and I guess I kind of get all that, as much as it frustrates me, but what is going on with Kyrsten Sinema?

Explain Kyrsten Sinema to our listeners. I guess I've never heard or read an even remotely plausible explanation for what her whole deal is. Do you have a sense of it?

Adam Jentleson

I actually think that hers may just simply be a case of having miscalculated a little bit. Look, I think that prior to this year, a pretty reliable way to get the Garlands and plaudits of the centrist beltway crowd and the love of the Sunday show circuit, was to oppose filibuster reform. And so I think that, if her overriding strategic goal was to try to position herself in the John McCain maverick legacy, being from Arizona and all that, she is a person who used to be a member of the Green Party. So it is always a little bit of a stretch to accept that this is sincere, but let's, for the sake of argument, assume that somewhere in recent years, she had an ideological conversion that makes her now want to be a centrist.

David Roberts

Converted to centrism – highly implausible. But yeah, sure.

Adam Jentleson

But for the sake of argument, let's say it's sincere. Let’s say she wants to do that, and she wants to be hailed as an institutionalist by the Chuck Todds of the world. But I think it was a miscalculation, because the centrist brain just isn't there anymore.

David Roberts

Yeah, who are you playing to anymore?

Adam Jentleson

Exactly - there’s no constituency for filibuster defense anymore. I think that's largely a function of how radical the Republican party has become – I think McConnell has lost a lot of his shine. He used to do a really good job of sort of dressing up as obstruction in these institutional myths, and I think that's come off a lot since the Trump era. But there's no constituency for what she's selling right now. You've seen her approval rating drop in Arizona. A lot of that may be due to her vote against the minimum wage that got a lot of attention. But I can tell you one thing, which is that it is not a senator's goal to spend the first year of a new administration having their approval rating tank in their home state. So whatever she's doing is not good.

David Roberts

I guess you could just say she misread the room badly, but she seems, having done so now, to just be kind of doubling down on it, curtseying while she kills things. She seems to be going out of her way to be antagonistic.

Adam Jentleson

She could lose a primary in Arizona – there are credible primary challenge challenges in Arizona who could both be in a primary and then when the state – someone like Ruben Gayego, in Congress. No one could beat Manchin in a primary in West Virginia, or if they did, they would absolutely lose the seat. So that's a different story. But you know, Sinema can't claim to be the only Democrat who can hold that seat. There are viable Democrats; there's a relatively deep bench in Arizona. So she's putting herself at risk of actually alienating her allies and inviting a primary challenge. She's not up until 2024, so it's not a super imminent prospect, but that's just another way in which I think she really did just kind of miscalculate here and is going to have to find a way to climb down off this limb.

David Roberts

Yeah, I mean, that's pretty historic, a pretty historic misreading of the room. You get elected for one term as a Democrat and your legacy is “Oh, I ensured that democracy would fall apart and then got booted. That was me in the Senate.” 

One thing that I feel like you'll have some unique insight–and it's an ongoing fight, and it's a fight on Twitter every day–is on people who say, Schumer needs to get Manchin on board, Schumer needs to bust some heads, or make some speeches or threaten some pork or threaten committee assignments or be LBJ–how many times have you heard this–be LBJ toward toward these recalcitrant senators and get them on board. And the fact that he's not doing that is evidence that Democrats actually don't want anything to happen and they're all bought and sold by corporations, whatever, whatever. 

So what leverage does Schumer have over Manchin? I know we talked about this on Twitter and we're like “It's not our job,” but I feel like this is something people want to know. Is it true that Schumer could be twisting his arm if he could? My sense is that Manchin’s ego is so huge, his vanity is so all consuming, that if you go up directly against him and try to sort of punish him or smack him into behaving, that is precisely what will trigger that guy's vanity, and he will take great pride in defying it. And that would just trigger all the wrong dynamics. But I don't know, I'm not up there; I don't see into either of their heads. So what's your take on this? Could Schumer be going harder on Manchin than he is? 

Adam Jentleson

We were having this discussion on Twitter the other day, this is like the Green Lantern theory of politics. As Matt Yglesias introduced to Brendan Nyhan, who I think turned it into the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency, it’s the idea that individuals can rise up against and defy the structural or forces of the universe to make great things happen. And as you pointed out, there's something that people said with Obama all the time, “Why can't he, you know, deliver all these big things that he's promised?” 

David Roberts

Why can’t he make Joe Lieberman be a less horrible person?

Adam Jentleson

Right. So here's the thing, as you pointed out, it is unfalsifiable as an argument. You could always just say, “Well, if they'd only tried harder, and they pushed harder, they did this, done this or that.” And so it's a difficult thing to deal with. But I think that, given the stakes of this issue, it is really important to sort of surround it with as many facts as you can to try to get an answer there. 

I would say a real example of Green Lantern-ism was Joe Biden on the campaign trail, saying he was going to cause Republicans to have an epiphany, and deliver all these Republican votes and usher in a new era of bipartisan dealmaking. That was really interesting because that was going up against structural forces that are causing Republicans to be polarized and not want to deal; they're larger than any individual can deal with. I would argue, on the flip side, that expecting leaders and a president to be able to deliver a small handful of votes from their own party, for bills that are broadly popular with the American people, is not Green Lantern-ism and as a more reasonable expectation of leaders. 

And so then, you say, so what's the leverage? This is where I don't want to be evasive, but the thing is, that's just sort of what a leader figures out. I worked for Harry Reid, but I wasn't Harry Reid, you know what I mean? Reid's unique skill as a leader was to figure out what it was that could get a person to Yes, and sometimes that is twisting arms and sometimes it’s just persuasion.

David Roberts

They don't have earmarks anymore, right? That was a huge tool for that purpose.

Adam Jentleson

Right. But one of the things they have is the massive public pressure, of the fact that you have commentators across the political spectrum begging senators to save our democracy here, and advocating for filibuster reform. So what I would stipulate is that under these conditions, it is possible for a very skilled leader to find a way to get Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to Yes. 

And we may not be able to say, well, you should call this donor in West Virginia or this interest group and they'll be the ones to twist his arm and get him to Yes, or, this friend of his from childhood, who will be the one to persuade him, you know what I mean? We don't know what these things are, but what is the marginal value of a leader if they don't have more insight into what can move Manchin than you and me talking here on this podcast, or people on Twitter?

David Roberts

Well he's not running again also, right? He's not running for the Senate again, do we know that?

Adam Jentleson

Well, I think a lot of people speculate that he won't. The reason is, you know, he barely won in 2018 by something like barely 3 points

David Roberts

He doesn’t particularly seem to like the Senate either.

Adam Jentleson

Yeah, exactly. But that was sort of cut, I think, in favor of being willing to do reform because why not? You know, why sort of be the guy to kill Biden's agenda on your way out the door, and then just peace out? You know what I mean? Like why not to say YOLO. 

David Roberts

“He might run for governor” is one thing I hear, and if you're gonna run for governor of West Virginia, you need that Maverick-y whatever.

Adam Jentleson 

Yeah, sure. But, you know, I think that the same reason he might not win as governor is the same as why he might not win in the Senate because it's a statewide election. His state is Trump-y by 30 points, and he barely squeaked by in 2018. So all that is to say, I don't think that I'm arguing that this is an easy thing to do. But you know, Lyndon Johnson, when they brought the 1964 Civil Rights Act to the floor, they didn't have the votes for it. It was filibustered for three months. Through a consistent process of working with members, listening to what they wanted, and applying pressures to strategic points, they got the votes for it. 

I mean, Reid got the 60 votes for the Health Care bill. The last vote was Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Reid didn't have his vote until after he brought the bill to the floor; the famous “Cornhusker Kickback” was a deal that was cut while the bill was on the floor. So you find a way. And I think that right now, Schumer is doing a good job. I think this filibuster on the 1/6 commission, setting a clear deadline for S1 in June: he's sort of setting boundaries, and sort of creating a cauldron of pressure around Manchin. So I would argue that I think he's doing a good job, but we're gonna have to see how this comes out. But between a president in Biden who ran on being a dealmaker and bragging about all the deals you could cut, and Schumer who wants to be LBJ, the two of them working together, really should be able to find a way to get Manchin to Yes.

David Roberts

Well, the weird thing is, if you're a vain person–I mean, Manchin is the pivot point now–he could single handedly save US democracy. What better way to flatter one's own vanity than to literally be a hero?

Adam Jentleson

That’s right. And it's not just the left that will congratulate him. Yeah. I mean, it will be David Brooks writing in his column. I mean, this is a very big opportunity to be a hero who will go down in history as having done a good thing. This is going to stand up well, to history, if he shifts in favor of reform to help these democracy reforms to pass.

David Roberts

One of the more cynical takes on all this is that one of the reasons Democrats–some Democratic senators–like the filibuster, is that they probably don't have 50 votes for a lot of these things, and they don't want the awkwardness; they don't want that to be known. They don't want that to be recorded. How much of this sort of big bold agenda that we're talking about would happen? Like people say, you get rid of the filibuster and then it's the PRO Act, and SB 1, and this and that. How much of that bold agenda do you think really, when the rubber hits the road, has all 50 Democratic votes?

Adam Jentleson

I think a fair amount of it will. There's a lot of talk that's like, “Oh, what has 50 votes,” but I think that's the wrong metric. I think you should look at what has like 46-ish votes, because bills too often don't have the votes until they get to the floor. I would also look at what bills have like 46, but no hard No-s against them. And so I would throw the PRO Act into that category. I think it actually has 46 votes, and of the outstanding Democrats, nobody's come out and said, “Absolutely, I'm not for it.” So that to me says, that is a situation that’s ripe for when you get that bill to the floor and you make whatever deals you need to make to get those last four Democrats. That's a bill that's gonna pass. I would put S1 in that category, you've got 49 co sponsors out of 50; Manchin has said he has problems with it, but he also co-sponsored that exact same bill the previous Congress, so I don't think there's any showstopper there that prevents him from getting to Yes. So I would look at the range of things that are maybe 45 plus, with nobody like campaigning against them. I would say all of those things are possible: the DREAM Act, which probably already has 40 or 50; I'd say some version of background checks. Obviously, the voting rights preclearance, and those things, a lot of big important stuff. 

I think on energy and climate, the question is what's going to fall out of reconciliation, what will be deemed that it can't comply with the rules by the parliamentarian. I think you'll have a fair amount of droppings––they call them Byrd droppings because it's the Byrd rule that causes them to fall out of the package. So you'll probably have a fair amount of Byrd droppings to sweep up on climate change that you'll want to get through. It's a lot of stuff and I think voting rights alone: that to me is enough reason to do it. But I think that there's a lot of other stuff–paid family leave, which got ruled out of last reconciliation bill, maybe a compromise on the minimum wage–there's a lot of stuff that you can get through if if they go nuclear relatively soon and in a way that allows them to have time to pass all those things. DC statehood, by the way, is another critically important bill that has an uphill climb to be sure, but also is in the mid to high 40s already and given the stakes, I think it would have a decent chance of passage as well.

David Roberts

Here's one of the overarching questions that I and I think a bunch of people have. It's probably unanswerable on some level, but, it really seems like US senators, particularly Democratic senators, are in a bubble that is nigh impenetrable. Like, there are things that among sort of your generally politically engaged lefty, have now become sort of bog obvious conventional wisdom, like that the Republicans are all about obstruction, and that the filibuster is reactionary, just on and on, that just don't seem to penetrate the US Senate. I guess I'm just sort of curious about the life world of a Democratic senator. Who are they talking to, and where are they getting the reinforcement for the sort of antiquated views that they cling to? If they turn tune into  progressive websites, or cable channels or anything, they're gonna see arguments against themselves; they're gonna be pelted by arguments against themselves. So somehow they're remaining immune? And I guess I'm just wondering, like, what is the kind of epistemic bubble that they've created, and how are they maintaining it in the face of such a torrent of criticism?

Adam Jentleson

The answer is the Senate. You know, it's its own self protecting entity. And it actually sort of takes a very active role in self protection. As soon as Senators start orientation, they're sort of told a lot of these myths about the institution, and a lot of them come over from the House. It's sort of defined to them in contrast to the House and it’s said, “This is a place where we're supposed to be slow, we're supposed to be frustrating. This is the whole purpose of the institution. And in fact, this is what makes it great,” is what they're told. So it creates this perverse dynamic, where arguments from outside only reinforce their sort of defensiveness about the Senate, because they immediately become almost brainwashed into believing that the outside world doesn't understand this complex and beautiful institution. And if the President is arguing against them, well, that's the executive branch and the whole point of the Senate is to be a check on the executive. So we shouldn't let them determine what we do as senators. There's a grain of truth to that, like we were talking about before, but it's become vastly exaggerated. The Senate is supposed to be thoughtful, and craft thoughtful solutions, but it's not supposed to just not pass any solutions.

David Roberts

It’s not supposed to not do anything. There's no exactly theory of government that results in that being the conclusion

Adam Jentleson 

What you do see, though, is that a lot of the younger senators, I think, are less susceptible to that.

David Roberts

Brian Schatz, came into the Senate and heard the myths like everybody else, but he just looked around, and he's like, oh, we're not doing anything. We're not getting anything done. It's possible for them to realize.

Adam Jentleson

That's right, because the big difference with the younger crowd is that they haven't experienced any success in the Senate. All they've seen is an institution that's failed. And so it's the older folks who can recall an era where they did actually get things done on a bipartisan basis. There aren't that many of them left. And that's why the caucus quickly got to like 45, 46, 47, in support of filibuster reform, because it is much younger and much more composed of folks who are ready for change. But it is still folks, who can sort of recall an era where they did cut this deal, and they did overcome a filibuster and yada yada, that still are sometimes susceptible to thismythmaking. 

David Roberts

There's a certain view out there, which I hold onto every other day or so, which says that the GOP has become so homogenous illogically, racially, etc., and so radicalized against the Democratic Party and democracy. There's just a notion that there is no rule based system that can continue working if one of two parties has decided it doesn't favor democracy anymore and feels it's just not restrained at all by the rules, especially by unspoken, sort of unwritten norms. If you just break free of those entirely, and become sort of the purely nihilistic party that's purely about power, is there any set of rules that can make that work? Is it possible to sort of reform our way past this? Or, do you think that we're sort of headed for some sort of reckoning regardless?

Adam Jentleson

Yeah, look, not to end on a depressing note, but the answer is, I'm not sure. I mean, I don't know, and I'm not gonna sit here and tell your listeners that I think filibuster reform is going to solve all of our problems, and especially these larger structural problems that you're talking about. However, I will say that I think it is sort of the necessary, if not sufficient condition, to solve our problems. I think that you can't solve any of them, if you don't reform the filibuster, because you're not going to be able to pass things like S1, and Voting Rights, and all these other bills that I think could pass if we got rid of the filibuster. It is a step in the right direction. And it's, and we're certainly not going to solve them if we don't do it. 

I come back to DC statehood; I think DC status is a critically important reform that if we are able to get rid of the filibuster, we should put all our effort into passing, because that will address some of the deeper structural inequities of the Senate, especially when it comes to how underrepresented non white Americans are in the Senate. So I think it opens the door to the possibility that we can pass the reforms we need to fix these deeper structural issues. And I don't think we have a lot of hope of solving them if we don't do it. But it's gonna be a long, uphill fight, and I think that it's going to be a struggle. 

But like you look at the vote today on the January 6 Commission, it was a bipartisan vote. You know, you had seven Republicans join with Democrats to support the commission, but it failed, because you didn't get to 60. So if you're gonna sort of start to draw this party back into the norm of legislating, and actually start to have at least a little bit of bipartisanship, the only way you're going to do it is if you get rid of the filibuster, because you're just not going to get to 60 in today's Senate at any time in the foreseeable future. But you could get to 52, 53, 54 on a lot of different things. And so if we're going to draw this party back into the arena, and get them to not be completely off in crazy land, you have to make it easier to pass things and make it easier, you know, for the gears of legislating to actually turn again. 

David Roberts

It's ironic that the filibuster, which Manchin says is preserving bipartisanship, is arguably preventing it, preventing the Republican Party from stepping down off this ledge. Thank you so much for coming on, and helping me plumb the mysteries of this very worst of the world's legislative institutions.

Adam Jentleson

Absolutely man, it was really fun to talk. 

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