|
"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
|
Republicans Gone Wild: Q&A with Mann and Ornstein
|
Parent(s) |
Party
|
Contributor | RP |
Last Edited | RP Oct 15, 2015 11:33am |
Logged |
0
|
Category | Commentary |
Author | Francis Wilkinson |
News Date | Wednesday, October 14, 2015 05:50:00 PM UTC0:0 |
Description | Political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein are longtime scholars of American politics in general and the U.S. Congress in particular. They were among the first mainstream analysts, and arguably the most influential, to make the case that the "broken" condition of Washington is actually a manifestation of a single broken political party. After House Speaker John Boehner announced his resignation, I began an e-mail conversation with Mann, of the Brookings Institution and the University of California at Berkeley, and Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute, about the dangerous state of Congress.
There is no clear path out of our current distemper. The solution, like the diagnosis, must focus on the obvious but seldom acknowledged asymmetry between the parties. The Republican Party must become a conservative governing party once again and accept the assumptions and norms of our Madisonian system. That will likely require more election defeats, more honest reporting by the mainstream press and more recognition by the public that the problem is not "Washington" or "Congress" or "insiders" or politicians in general.
The burden is on the GOP because they are currently the major source of our political dysfunction. |
Share |
|
2¢
|
|
Article | Read Full Article |
|
Date |
Category |
Headline |
Article |
Contributor |
|
|