Hello friends, welcome back to the Bill Press pod and welcome to the war zone known as Washington, D.C.

Remember when we used to complain about gridlock? Well, no longer.

Gridlock meant that at least Congress was trying to get something done.

They just couldn't agree on how to do so. Today, it's a whole lot worse. Congress doesn't even try to get anything done.

They just sit around doing nothing. Don't even attempt to do anything to address the major problems facing this country, instead spend all of their

time in silly, ugly, purely personal and political partisan attacks. All of it, of course, led and

encouraged by that ugly partisan in the White House. Even veteran Congress watchers like Norm Ornstein say that they've never seen

the Congress more divided or less productive than it is today. And Ornstein blames it not on both

parties, but on the obstructive, destructive, and constant warfare wage by congressional Republicans.

I sat down with Norm Ornstein in his office at the American Enterprise Institute.

Norm, it's good to see you. Thanks for joining us.

Oh, what a delight to be with you, Bill?

Thank you. So you have been a Congress watcher here in Washington for a long time. You and Thomas Mann wrote this

great book. It's even worse than it looks. You and I've talked about the book before. As bad as it was then,

have you ever seen it as bad as it is today? I have not seen anything like this, and that long time is 50 years now

that I've been immersed in this process. So we did, it's even worse than it looks in 2012.

We followed with a paperback. It's even worse than it was two years later. Somebody said,

what's the next one? I said, it will probably be run for your lives um but of course

those were before trump and it's important to emphasize that the rot in the system the rot of the

republican party uh began before Trump.

The cultural divisions that we have,

the fact that we emphasized in this book

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