Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. And welcome to the politics guys with your host, Jay Carson and Michael Baranowski.

Welcome to the politics guys. I'm Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

My guest today is political scientist Norman Ornstein. Dr. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, a columnist for National Journal, and the author of many books on U.S. politics, including

it's even worse than it looks, how the American constitutional system collided with the

new politics of extremism, co-authored with the Brooking Institution's Thomas Mann.

It's a book that won widespread praise, and deservedly so.

I liked it so much that for the past several years I've been using

it as one of the primary books in my course on American political institutions so I'm really

glad to have the opportunity to talk to Dr. Ornstein on the show Norman Orstein welcome to the show

that's great to be with you Michael you know I've been following your work for, well, many years now.

And I feel like the one big theme, which I definitely saw in your book, The Broken Branch, and even more so, and it's even worse than it looks, is that Congress has become deeply dysfunctional.

And so I'm wondering, how did that happen and who or what, in your view,

is responsible? Well, there's a lot of blame to go around. There are no angels here, as I often say.

Right. But if we're going to trace the trajectory, you could first go back to the beginning of

serious partisan polarization, which really could take

you back to the 1960s when we began to see the race issue emerge again, the solid south becoming

competitive and then Republican, the Northeast and New England and the

West Coast going from being strongholds of moderate republicanism to being the bluest regions

in the country.

And the parties that used to have quite a lot of admixture ideologically became much more cohesive and

moved further apart. But, you know, you can be polarized and still manage to function and

solve problems. Look at Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, a liberal, Democratic, conservative

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