Transcript
Thomas Mann: We hereby declare the broken branch mended. Everything is back in shape. Government is running smoothly. And there's nothing to worry about.
Well, it isn't quite that good. It's a little more complicated, and maybe we can share with you some of the complications as we look back over the 110th Congress and ahead to the 111th.
This is a very exciting time for any of us interested in public affairs in the U.S. and government and policymaking. We've had an extraordinary election, following hard on the heels of yet another Democratic wave election in 2006, creating now a unified Democratic government with enlarged Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate and a President with a very ambitious agenda, but an identified style of governance that seems very much designed to counter the very pathologies that have characterized our politics in recent years -- excessive partisanship, ideological rigidity, a constitutional system out of balance, a culture of corruption and administrative incompetence.
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