If you are unhappy with our dysfunctional Congress, don’t
blame the Democrats. Blame the
Republicans because they created the mess. And, they did it on purpose.
In their new book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,”
political scientists Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein write:
Today’s Republicans in
Congress behave like a parliamentary party in a British-style parliament, a
winner-take-all system. But a parliamentary party — “ideologically polarized,
internally unified, vehemently oppositional” — doesn’t work in a
“separation-of-powers system that makes it extremely difficult for majorities
to work their will.”
These Republicans
“have become more loyal to party than to country,” the authors write, so “the
political system has become grievously hobbled at a time when the country faces
unusually serious problems and grave threats. . . . The country is squandering
its economic future and putting itself at risk because of an inability to
govern effectively.”
Today’s Republican
Party has little in common even with Ronald Reagan’s GOP, or with earlier
versions that believed in government. Instead it has become “an insurgent
outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and
economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional
understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy
of its political opposition . . . all but declaring war on the government.”
Mann and Ornstein blame Newt Gingrich for creating the
modern radical Republican Party: His eagerness “to paint . . . his own
institution [when Democrats controlled it] as elitist, corrupt and arrogant . .
. undermined basic public trust in Congress and government. . . . His attacks
on partisan adversaries in the White House and Congress created a norm in which
colleagues with different views became mortal enemies. . . . He helped invent
the modern permanent campaign, allowing electoral goals to dominate policy
ones. . . . One has to look back to Gingrich as the singular political figure
who set the tone that followed.”
My hope is that American voters will vote overwhelmingly for
the Democratic Party in this year’s elections to send a message to Republicans
that they must move back toward the center and return to governing rather than
just obstructing if they wish to remain a viable force in American politics.
See an excellent review of the Mann/Ornstein book in the
Washington Post here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/its-even-worse-than-it-looks-how-the-american-constitutional-system-collided-with-the-new-politics-of-extremism-by-thomas-e-mann-and-norman-j-ornstein/2012/04/30/gIQA2ohKsT_story_1.html?sub=AR
Mann and Ornstein quotes in this post are from the Post article.
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