Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Veteran Congress-watchers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein say the legislative branch has turned to political hostage-taking instead of negotiation, and the practice is driving the country to dysfunction, from last year's debt ceiling showdown to the art of the filibuster.
The pair looked to history to analyze today's most-used political tactics and to recommend ways to reform. Those insights come in a new book called, "It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism."
Thomas Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Norman Ornstein is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. And they both join me now.
Significant excerpts
THOMAS MANN, Brookings Institution: We do believe there are two profound drivers of our dysfunctional politics.
The first is the mismatch between our political parties that are parliamentary-like, ideologically polarized, internally unified, and set on destroying the other. But the second factor, which is, frankly, overlooked in the press among pundits, by scholars and almost everyone else, is that one of our political parties, namely the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier.
They are ideologically extreme, contemptuous of centuries worth of policy, economics and social, scornful of compromise, no use much for facts, evidence, and science, and really not accepting of the political legitimacy of the other party. That makes a big difference.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Norm Ornstein, if a Republican were sitting here today who believes in what they're doing, they would say, but it's really -- it's really about policy. We disagree with the president and the Democrats on the size of the deficit, on spending. We don't think the tax cuts should end.
NORMAN ORNSTEIN, American Enterprise Institute: There have been serious differences between the parties and their world views and their outlooks for a long time.
But just to pick a couple of quick examples, Judy, the Affordable Care Act, the health care bill that passed without a single Republican vote, was basically the Republican alternative that had been written to oppose the Clinton health care plan in 1993 by several people, including Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch, current senators who now denounce those same ideas as socialistic.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Republicans.
NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Republicans.
It's a different culture than we saw 20 years ago or 30 years ago. And it's why people like Chuck Hagel, a very conservative Republican former senator, has decried what's gone on in own party.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And to pick up on the role of the media, the new media, how has that changed what's going on, Norm?
NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Well, it really is -- in a way, it's back to the future.
We had partisan media in the 19th century. We have it now with FOX, with MSNBC, and with a lot of others, with talk radio. But this is different. We don't share a common set of facts. And we live in worlds that amplify those differences and, in fact, help to create the hype that we're in a tribal world and you've got to oppose the other side because they're evil.
JUDY WOODRUFF: You do write about solutions and how do you fix it.
Tom Mann, one of the things you talk about is expanding the vote.
THOMAS MANN: Yes. There are three ways to fix it.
One is to change the parties, so they aren't so parliamentary-like, that is, ideologically polarized. One of the ways of doing that over time is to enlarge the electorate, so that you don't have those most highly motivated to show up being at the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum.
So we embrace all kinds of efforts to increase the electorate, including something as daring as what the Australians do, which is to have mandatory attendance at the polls. You don't show up at the polls, you pay a fine. It's not a big fine, but, you know, Australians get 95 percent turnout, and the parties don't have an incentive to play to their bases, but rather to talk -- talk to the swing voters. It does make a difference.
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