Hey, everybody, we got a great one today, you know, for a change.

Norm Ornstein is with us, but this time he's with his buddy, Tom Mayn.

Now, these guys have been two of the most respected political scientists among Republicans and Democrats for decades and decades

until about a decade ago. When they wrote a groundbreaking book, it's even worse than it looks.

Then Republicans started kind of hating them. Now, part of the reason they were so respected

for years, they had been, I guess what you call honest brokers.

Norm was the more conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, Tom for Brookings, the liberal Washington think tank.

And so everyone in D.C. would talk to them.

And Norm and Tom were very influential. For example, Norm

was a key advisor to John McCain and Russ Feingold on McCain-Feingold, which was one of the most

significant campaign finance reform bills in history. But at a certain point, the Republican Party

just went off the rails. It had been

trending that way with Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay. But during the Obama administration,

they ceased to become a political party that had any moorings whatsoever in terms of serving the American people.

Mitch McConnell stated very clearly right after Obama's election that his goal was to see to it

that Obama was a one-term president, just as his stated intention now is to spend 100% of his time fighting every bit of

Joe Biden's agenda.

So Tom and Norm wrote their book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks, and it was a runaway bestseller,

but the Washington journalist class continued to engage in a lot of false equivalents under the guise of balance.

It would be like Democrats say that the climate is changing and will have catastrophic effects for our children and for our children's children.

Republicans, well, they say that's not happening.

A couple of weeks ago, John Harwood wrote a piece for CNN, said, basically, these two guys

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