Congress is Broken and it's the Republicans' fault, mostly...

[CRK7376]

There was a great story on NPR this morning. Congress is broken and it's mostly Republicans fault.....go figure!

http://www.npr.org/2012/04/30/151522725/even-worse-than-it-looks-extremism-in-congress


Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein are no strangers to D.C. politics. The two of them have been in Washington for more than 40 years — and they're renowned for their carefully nonpartisan positions.

But now, they say, Congress is more dysfunctional than it has been since the Civil War, and they aren't hesitating to point a finger at who they think is to blame.

"One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, 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," they write in their new book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks.

[Zorro]

1. Newt Gingrich is a key architect to the current dysfunctional state of government

When Speaker of the House he was quite vocal about wanting to transform government along more parliamentary lines.

The Republicans have since embraced that philosophical approach, and is why it is so difficult to get any of them to break lockstep/goosestep to reach a political compromise on grave national issues.