Interview | Washington Post Wonkblog

Alice Rivlin Was In Charge of the Last Government Shutdown. This is What She Saw.

September 27, 2013, Neil Irwin

In the News

Today, committees have lost much of their autonomy to party leaders. As a result, investigations are often used in periods of divided government as a partisan tool to club the administration and its supporters. More often than not, committee investigations become arenas for majority party “message politics” — contests designed to score political points rather than to identify problems or to generate solutions that can garner bipartisan support. The higher the partisanship in Congress, the lower its committees seem to fall.

May 9, 2013, Sarah A. Binder, New York Times

In the News

Sadly, divided party government, which we have because of the Republican House, in a time of extreme partisan polarization, is a formula for inaction and absolutist opposition politics, not for problem solving.

April 26, 2013, Thomas E. Mann, Moyers & Company

Interview | Moyers & Company

Why Congress is Failing Us

April 26, 2013, Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein

In the News

Ironically, Obama tried harder and longer than the results merited to work cooperatively with Republicans in Congress. He has learned painfully that his public embrace of a policy virtually ensures Republican opposition and that intensive negotiations with Republican leaders are likely to lead to a dead end. No bourbon and branch-water laced meetings with Republicans in Congress or pre-emptive compromises with them will induce cooperative behavior.

March 6, 2013, Thomas E. Mann, U.S. News & World Report

Interview | NPR

As 'Devastating' as Sequester is, not 'Immediate Catastrophe'

March 3, 2013, Thomas E. Mann

In the News

What has a chance of going somewhere if the president and the Congress can get back together is some version of a grand bargain, and a grand bargain means we have to slow the growth of the entitlements, especially Medicare and Medicaid. We have to put Social Security back on a firm foundation. And we have to reform our tax code so it raises some more revenue. We need to do that and stop fooling around with this counterproductive thing called the sequester, which is bad macro policy, it would reduce employment when we don't want to.

February 23, 2013, Alice M. Rivlin, CNN

In the News

Don’t hold your breath [on Obama seriously tackling entitlement reform]. He has every reason to sit tight and play to his base. The American public is very much on his side.

February 11, 2013, Ron Haskins, The Daily Beast

In the News

[Obama's tone of his ’08 campaign] hasn’t worked very well, but this is the moment to go back to it, because if he doesn’t, he dooms the rest of his term to squabbling with the Republicans.

February 11, 2013, Alice M. Rivlin, The Daily Beast

In the News

I think that Obama's second inaugural address will go down in history as the last speech of his election campaign. I think the 2013 State of the Union address will be regarded as the framing speech for his second term. If President Obama wants to be a transformational president and be regarded in history in that way, he's going to have to build on this new vision of government that he's advancing.

February 11, 2013, William A. Galston, AFP