Product Description

Congress is the first branch of government in the American system, write Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, but now it is a broken branch, damaged by partisan bickering and internal rancor. The Broken Branch offers both a brilliant diagnosis of the cause of Congressional decline and a much-needed blueprint for change, from two experts who understand politics and revere our institutions, but believe that Congress has become deeply dysfunctional.
Mann and Ornstein, two of the nations most renowned and judicious scholars of government and politics, bring to light the historical roots of Congress's current maladies, examining 40 years of uninterrupted Democratic control of the House and the stunning midterm election victory of 1994 that propelled Republicans into the majority in both House and Senate. The byproduct of that long and grueling but ultimately successful Republican campaign, the authors reveal, was a weakened institution bitterly divided between the parties. They highlight the dramatic shift in Congress from a highly decentralized, committee-based institution into a much more regimented one in which party increasingly trumps committee. The resultant changes in the policy process--the demise of regular order, the decline of deliberation, and the weakening of our system of checks and balances--have all compromised the role of Congress in the American Constitutional system. Indeed, Speaker Dennis Hastert has unabashedly stated that his primary responsibility is to pass the president's legislative program--identifying himself more as a lieutenant of the president than a steward of the house. From tax cuts to the war against Saddam Hussein to a Medicare prescription drug benefit, the legislative process has been bent to serve immediate presidential interests and have often resulted in poorly crafted and stealthily passed laws. Strong majority leadership in Congress, the authors conclude, led not to a vigorous exertion of congressional authority but to a general passivity in the face of executive power.
A vivid portrait of an institution that has fallen far from the aspirations of our Founding Fathers, The Broken Branch highlights the costs of a malfunctioning Congress to national policymaking, and outlines what must be done to repair the damage.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #292456 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Until recently, one could be forgiven for thinking that the present Congress is essentially an arm of the Bush administration, according to Mann and Ornstein, nationally renowned congressional scholars from the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, respectively. Their book argues persuasively that relentless partisanship and a disregard for institutional procedures have led Congress to be more dysfunctional than at any time in recent memory. Looking back to the arbitrary and sometimes authoritarian leadership of Democratic speaker Jim Wright and the Abscam scandals of the 1980s, the authors demonstrate how they presage the much worse abuses of power committed by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. In outlining more than 200 years of congressional history, Mann and Ornstein sometimes allow just a sentence or two to explain the policies and philosophies of an important politician or even an entire party, even as they catalogue deviations from obscure points of procedure in extensive detail. Their book may be useful and enjoyable to the specialist, though recent conservative pushback on issues from the Harriet Miers nomination to warrantless wiretapping and immigration will make some wish the authors had had the opportunity to add a postscript. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Citizens baffled by the House of Representatives' allocation of its time in July -- spent mostly on flag burning, stem-cell research, gay marriage, the Pledge of Allegiance, religion and gun control -- can find cogent explanations for its political priorities in this slim, forceful volume. Not that the subjects that ate up the House calendar last month are addressed here; they are not. It is the institution of Congress that Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein dissect, and they find it in appalling condition.

The authors are members of what, sadly, may be a disappearing breed in Washington: independent-minded, knowledgeable experts whose concern for process is stronger than their desires for particular outcomes. They are means guys in an age dominated by ends. And they most emphatically do not believe that any particular end justifies craven or extra-legal means.

Mann and Ornstein are Washington fixtures, Mann at the Brookings Institution and Ornstein at the American Enterprise Institute. You've seen them both on television and quoted countless times; they are the sort of pundits that reporters rely on. They have been friends, sometimes rivalrous ones, since graduate school; they studied together at the University of Michigan and were congressional fellows together in 1969. Their personal politics are left-of-center, but, as they declare at the beginning of the book, their strongest partisanship is institutional. "For us," they write, "Congress has always been the first branch." Their devotion to Congress has won them admirers from all points on the political spectrum. A blurb from former Republican speaker of the House Newt Gingrich makes the point: "Mann and Ornstein understand well the glaring gap between the framers' design and today's reality."

The Founding Fathers quite deliberately described Congress in the first article of the Constitution, the presidency in the second. The authors of a revolution designed to overthrow a monarch did not want to put a comparably powerful chief executive officer in the king's place. Congress, explicitly granted the power to raise and spend money, was to have the upper hand.

Over more than two centuries of American history, the founders' intention to create a strong legislature has repeatedly been tested -- and sometimes evaded, as in recent years. Until now, the pendulum has always swung back toward the Capitol after periods of unusually strong White House influence. Mann and Ornstein fervently want this to happen again; their book explains why they consider this so important and provides some ideas for how it might happen. But fundamental change will not come from tinkering reforms, they argue; only angry voters can force the House and Senate to correct themselves.

Their account of the recent decline of Congress, and particularly the House, is scathing but difficult to dispute. They blame a poisonously partisan division in both houses and in the country for much of today's congressional bickering and irrelevance. Partisan warfare led Republicans to cater to "the base," the country's most conservative Republicans, which explains the House's bizarre agenda in July. Mann and Ornstein trace the origins of partisan warfare back to the 1980s, when a contemptuous Democratic majority dominated the House without any fear or expectation that the Republicans would ever regain control. But Gingrich's forces did, of course, leading first to the spectacle of a wholly partisan impeachment of a sitting president and then to the first period of extended GOP control of both Congress and the White House since the 1920s.

"The arrival of unified Republican government in 2001 transformed the aggressive and active GOP-led Congress of the Clinton years into a deferential and supine body, one extremely reluctant to demand information, scrub presidential proposals, or oversee the executive," Mann and Ornstein write. "The uncompromising assertion of executive authority by President Bush and Vice President Cheney was met with a whimper, not a principled fight, by the Republican Congress." The authors write contemptuously of House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and his willingness to ignore House rules and traditions to ram through legislation to please the White House.

History is often ignored or forgotten in contemporary America, but not by Mann and Ornstein. Their argument is strengthened by their ability to put it in historical context, to demonstrate how far the current Congress has wandered from the legislature's traditional and constitutional role. Unfortunately, Mann and Ornstein let their own history complicate their narrative by repeatedly quoting their earlier writings. Their editor did them no favor by permitting these self-citations, which create a "We told you so" tone not conducive to making, or winning, an argument.

Even so, it is easy to recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Congress, how it works and how it should work. Hastert would be particularly well-served by spending a few hours with The Broken Branch. And if, as Mann recently predicted in The Post's Outlook section, Democrats win control of the House in November, this book will suddenly be useful to both parties: to the Democrats as a cautionary tale and a useful blueprint, to the Republicans as an insight into where they went wrong.

Reviewed by Robert G. Kaiser
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
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. 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, this book is timed for the upcoming congressional elections. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Power Corrupts; Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely
Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein bring to light what many Americans don't know, or don't care to know. The legislative branch of government, the House of Representatives and the Senate have long ago stopped serving the constituents they were elected to serve.

In this searing story that will scare the republic out of you, the authors tell how the Congress of yesteryear, the Congress that would negotiate, debate, compromise, represent the will of their constituents, and the best interest of the country, are a dying breed.

They have been replaced by congressmen and women who have allowed lobbyists to write the bills for the special interests they represent. They have cajoled party members to vote strictly along party lines at the expense of constituent representation and independent thought. They have introduced bills hundreds of pages long with little or no time for debate or compromise, let alone time to read its provisions. They have introduced bills late at night demanding an up or down vote. Having complained long and loud about democratic pork, the republican congress has increased "earmarks" from hundreds to the thousands. And this is the laziest congress in years, working less than 100 days a year.

Leading the charge of congressional dysfunction are Sennsenbrenner, Frist, Hastert and Delay. Sennsenbrenner allowed the credit card industry to write the new bankruptcy bill. Sennsenbrenner wouldn't allow any amendments that would have allowed veterans to keep their homes or seniors to keep theirs in the face of astronomical medical bills. Hastert removed a congressman from the Ethics committee because he was investigating Delay. Delay demanded that lobbying firms replace their democrat lobbyists with republican ones if they wanted to be "allowed in." Then there's Frist. For the first time, Frist, a senator, went to another state to campaign against the democrat incumbent.

As for that bridge to nowhere, in Alaska, that was going to connect to a community of 50 at a cost of $22 million. Well, congress rescinded it, but gave the same amount of money to the state which has made it clear they intend to build it anyway. Then, there is the $10 billion of pork that congress made great fanfare about removing from the highway bill. What the average American doesn't realize is that they added an additional $10 billion just before they removed it. This was legislative sleight-of-hand.

Mann and Ornstein's strongest assertion is that Congress has failed as an independent branch of government. They claim they are subservient to the Executive branch and Mr. Bush. They do his bidding. The loss of billions of dollars in Iraq, money the legislature authorized for Afghanistan that was used in Iraq (an impeachable offense,) and the sluggish reaction to Hurricane Katrina have not generated any calls from a republican Congress for full and independent investigations.

This is a book that should be read by every American so he or she might awaken from their somnambulistic, political indifference. It is the average American who is allowing his and her rights to be trampled upon by apathy and ignorance.

The number of recent congressional and lobbying scandals give the book its credibility and validity. It also gives something else validity--

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Accurate analysis of the current state of national politics
I just watched a two hour panel on BookTV.org, CSPAN2. The panelists were the two authors, Newt Gingrich, and Tom Foley, the Democrat Speaker of the House before Newt. All were in agreement with the premise of this book: that the House has become a tool of the Executive branch, and has abrogated it's oversight duty. Bills are devised in the dead of night without bipartisan or even intra-party debate, simply to implement White House policy. Leader PACs and fund-raising are the key duties of our representatives. I was shocked to hear that the House has cut its in-session time from three days a week to one, as most members fly into DC on Tuesday night and out on Thursday morning. Most of the time they spend in DC is with lobbyists. This leaves no time for discussion or even reading the bills they are voting on. It leaves no time to get to talk with and to know the other Congressmen, or to hear dissenting views, and leads to the passage of flawed bills and acrimony with their colleagues.

Scariest of all is the invocation of war powers in a war that probably will not end in our lifetimes, at a time when the House, Senate, White House, and Supreme Court are all dominatted by one party. We could be just one terrorist attack away from a dictatorship. This book is a must-read for politicians, political scientists, reporters, and voters. Congress is neglecting its duty, and the American people are neglecting theirs by not voting and by not thinking about the issues that this book raises.

Helpful to Anyone Planning to Vote in November 2008
I have long understood the original terrible sin of Congress, the obscene corruption. I did not understand party line corruption (forcing Members to vote the party line instead of for their constituents until I read Tom Coburns Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders.

This book helped me understand that the third sin is that partisan politics have turned Members into (the author's term) "footsoldiers for the President" and thus a complete abdication of their role as the Article 1 (i.e. first) branch of government.

This book helped me understand that it is the long-serving Members who are often shaking down lobbyists and extorting funds from people, not the other way around, where bribes are offered by the lobbyists.

I read this book after reading David Broder's article in the 8 August 2006 issue of the Washington Post, an article entitled "Contempt for Congress" and summarizing the utter disdain that the Governors--both Republican and Democratic--have for most Members. The Congress is indeed broken and dysfunctional. There is a tide sweeping against all incumbents, regardless of party, in this year.

Hence, as Congress reconvenes on 5 September for one last session ending in early October, it could be quite fruitful for as many voters as possible to read this book and Tom Coburn's book, and demand of Congress two things in this next session: Electoral Reform, and a Public Intelligence Agency independent of both the President and Congress. We have a window for reform. This book is one of two pillars for those who wish to "raise the roof."

See also, with a review, Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It.

It is vital that the 100 million voters who have "dropped out" of the broken partisan political scene come back in 2008.