“The filibuster is paralyzing the Senate. It’s preventing it from doing the very basics, such as debating bills,” said Adam Jentleson, a one-time deputy chief of staff to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and founder of the Battle Born Collective, a progressive interest group.
Adam Jentleson, the founder of the Battle Born Collective and a former senior Senate Democratic aide, argued in the same call with reporters that, if they ascended to power, Republicans would have no compunction about ending the filibuster if it suited their purposes.
“I think the worst-case scenario for us is to not pass the things we can pass when Democrats are in power in the hopes of preserving this defensive tool, and then having Republicans get rid of it as soon as it stands in their way and passing the bad things we’re afraid of anyway,” Adam Jentleson, executive director of Battle Born Collective and author of “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate,” told Insider.
“’There is no third option,’ reads the letter, which is organized by Fix Our Senate and includes groups such as MoveOn, the Communications Workers of America, Common Cause, Indivisible, Stand Up America and Battle Born Collective.”
“Jentleson, Reid’s former deputy chief of staff, is an author and an advocate for abolishing the Senate filibuster; he and Katz, formerly Reid’s communications director, run Battle Born Collective, a progressive messaging shop.”
“I 100 percent believe that the fate of the Democrat Party in the foreseeable future is in the balance,” said Adam Jentleson, former senator Harry M. Reid’s deputy chief of staff and author of “Kill Switch,” in which he proposes that a bill should be able to pass with a simple majority vote, not 60 votes in the 100-member Senate, as can now happen due to the filibuster.
“The strongest defenses tend to emphasize that it’s a long-standing tradition and has a history of promoting bipartisanship,” Jentleson told me, adding that the “low level of awareness” of those folk theories means the coming P.R. battle is “much more of a jump ball situation.”
President Biden made major commitments to the American people rooted in his core promise to “restore the soul of the nation.” One hundred days into his administration, with unified Democratic control of Congress, strides have been made toward erasing the stain of the previous administration and setting the country on a different path. Regarding COVID-19, the administration’s actions on distributing and administering the vaccines are particularly laudable. Additionally, the American Rescue Plan was an important step toward stabilizing the country, and we applaud the administration for prioritizing its passage and not capitulating to Republican demands for insufficient relief.
“We would not be in a moment where we are even talking about the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act without grassroots efforts, without Black Lives Matter, without all of the individuals who took to the streets last summer,” said Tré Easton, a former Senate staffer working with the progressive group Battle Born Collective.
As Adam Jentleson points out, many civil-rights bills that were blocked by the the filibuster had enjoyed overwhelming public support: In 1941, 63 percent of the American public favored ending the poll tax. In 1937, 72 percent supported anti-lynching laws.
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