Tuesday, Doug talks to Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of the left-leaning Brookings Institution. Mann and Ornstein have been studying Congress for some 40 years and say they've never seen it this dysfunctional. In their latest book, they make no bones about their central thesis: the Republicans are the problem. Mann and Ornstein are in Utah and join us to explain how gridlock has become the status quo and why they say the problem will likely get worse after the November elections.
Thomas Mann is a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution. Norman Ornstein is a Resident Scholar at American Enterprise Institute. They are co-directors of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project and have written a number of books together. The latest, published earlier this year, is called It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism
Mann and Ornstein are in Utah as guests of The Hinckley Institute of Politics and the Marriott Library at the University of Utah. This Wednesday at 12:15 p.m., they'll give a lecture at the library's Gould Auditorium (Map). It's part of the international September Project. For more information click here.
Music from today's broadcast:
- Radiohead, Reckoner
- Pretty Lights, Stay
- The Mattson 2, Black Rain
