The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America And How T

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UtahOwl
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The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America And How T

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Originally Proposed - Fri Feb 5, 2010, at 9:19 am
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The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America And How To Get It Back
By Thomas E. Mann & Norman J. Ornstein

Available for $10.17 + shipping from Amazon.com or from your local library

(Be sure to get the 8/29/2008 paperback version which includes the Jan 2008 update – there is also a Jan 2009 update which does not appear to be readily available, but we will post it on this bulletin board if we can access it.)

Booklist review:

Mann and Ornstein are affiliated with different political parties and work at rival Washington think tanks, but they share a fascination with Congress and an abiding dedication to the First Branch's productivity. With this book, they stage an intervention. Over the past 20 years, they assert, legislators have increasingly subordinated earnest deliberation to partisan tribalism, eroding that branch into division and dysfunction. Although careful to remind us that the root causes of this decline lay in an escalating dialectic of majority arrogance and creative rule bending perpetuated by both parties, the brunt of Mann and Ornstein's criticisms are of the current Republican majority [editorial note: the review was written upon original publication in 2006]. They are not afraid to name names: House Speaker Dennis Hastert, for example, is repeatedly singled out as guilty of putting party before duty. The majority of Mann and Ornstein's analysis, however, examines incremental yet insidious tweaks of congressional procedure: three-day workweeks and innovative methods of arm-twisting. Both a plea for a return to dignified deliberation and a brave discussion of which legislative behaviors need to be changed.

UtahOwl

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