High Hopes for Congress

Campus Report ^ | January 12, 2009 | Daniel Allen

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High Hopes for Congress

by: Daniel Allen, January 12, 2009

The Brookings Institution presented a study of the accomplishments of the 110th Congress last Thursday, part of a project called “Mending the Broken Branch.” The study includes expectations for the 111th Congress, which began its first session last week.

Participants in the project emphasized that Congress and the public are hopeful about opportunities leaders of the 111th Congress will have to work across the aisle, crack down on corrupt and inappropriate practices, and begin to fix the problems of the “broken branch.” They also emphasize, however, that the repairs necessary to fix the Congress will not come easily, and will probably not come soon.

“Moving from broken to unbroken is not an easy thing to do,” said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and contributor to Mending the Broken Branch. He continued, “When you have a larger dynamic set in the last 20 years with culture, political trends, and changes inside the institution and outside, you can’t simply wave a magic wand or change a majority and expect that suddenly we are going to move to a very, very different environment.”

Along the same lines, Thomas Mann, a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution said, “We have plenty of crises to create the opportunity for action but the question is, ‘is Congress able to rise to the occasion?’”...

[Venturer]

The 111th Congress is a joke.