38: How We Got Here. Norm Ornstein on the Erosion of Norms from Gingrich to McConnell to Trump

The Al Franken Podcast

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4.6 • 7.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2020

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Veteran Washington observer Norm Ornstein tracks the erosion of norms that once allowed Washington to work. From Newt Gingrich instructing Republicans to demonize Democrats as “sick, corrupt, traitors” to Mitch McConnell denying Merrick Garland a hearing. The abandonment of fact-based evidence, shutting down the government, using the filibuster to grind the Senate to a halt, to a pathological President attacking the media as “enemies of the people.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everybody. We've got a great one today, you know, for a change. As you know, I try to keep
0:12.1	these shows evergreen. To do that, I don't do the news of the day. So today, I'm going to talk
0:20.7	about what led to where we are today, what led to where we are today, what led to the awful
0:27.7	divisions in Washington, why Washington doesn't work.
0:31.1	And it led to Trump and to the impeachment.
0:33.7	I'm having Norm Ornstein from the American Enterprise Institute.
0:37.3	Talk about the erosion of norms in Washington in Congress over the last 50 years in all our politics.
0:48.3	But I do want to say something about the impeachment.
0:51.3	I think this will be true forever.
0:53.3	It's my observation about
0:55.5	how ridiculous the Republicans are being about all of this. I've heard a number of them say
1:07.6	that phone call, that was about corruption. It was about Trump was really interested
1:15.6	in getting to the root of corruption in Ukraine. And that's why Brisbane wasn't about getting
1:24.6	dirt on the Bidens. It was about his lifelong interest, his lifelong dedication to anti-corruption.
1:41.3	Holy mackerel.
1:43.7	This guy, for example, i have a doctorate in uh anti-corruption uh from the trump university
1:52.6	the trump foundation had a big part of it was was was dedicated to anti-corruption.
2:04.1	This guy is the, he's corrupt every day of his life.
2:12.2	New York Times is in a huge article on how his father passed the money down to his kids, including Donald, completely
2:20.8	corruptly.
2:22.8	How Donald, we know that he rips off, you know, people supply pianos to his hotels.
2:31.3	I mean, he's, he is nothing, if not a corrupt man.
	...

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