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. 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.
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.
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. 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.
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