The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy) (Hardcover)

~ Thomas E. Mann (Author), Norman J. Ornstein (Author) "The bill that brought House members to a fateful vote early on November 23, 2003, was not your average piece of legislation..." (more)
Key Phrases: institutional decline, White House, House Republicans, Rules Committee (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Until recently, one could be forgiven for thinking that the present Congress is essentially an arm of the Bush administration, according to Mann and Ornstein, nationally renowned congressional scholars from the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, respectively. Their book argues persuasively that relentless partisanship and a disregard for institutional procedures have led Congress to be more dysfunctional than at any time in recent memory. Looking back to the arbitrary and sometimes authoritarian leadership of Democratic speaker Jim Wright and the Abscam scandals of the 1980s, the authors demonstrate how they presage the much worse abuses of power committed by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. In outlining more than 200 years of congressional history, Mann and Ornstein sometimes allow just a sentence or two to explain the policies and philosophies of an important politician or even an entire party, even as they catalogue deviations from obscure points of procedure in extensive detail. Their book may be useful and enjoyable to the specialist, though recent conservative pushback on issues from the Harriet Miers nomination to warrantless wiretapping and immigration will make some wish the authors had had the opportunity to add a postscript. (Aug.)
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From The Washington Post

Citizens baffled by the House of Representatives' allocation of its time in July -- spent mostly on flag burning, stem-cell research, gay marriage, the Pledge of Allegiance, religion and gun control -- can find cogent explanations for its political priorities in this slim, forceful volume. Not that the subjects that ate up the House calendar last month are addressed here; they are not. It is the institution of Congress that Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein dissect, and they find it in appalling condition.

The authors are members of what, sadly, may be a disappearing breed in Washington: independent-minded, knowledgeable experts whose concern for process is stronger than their desires for particular outcomes. They are means guys in an age dominated by ends. And they most emphatically do not believe that any particular end justifies craven or extra-legal means.

Mann and Ornstein are Washington fixtures, Mann at the Brookings Institution and Ornstein at the American Enterprise Institute. You've seen them both on television and quoted countless times; they are the sort of pundits that reporters rely on. They have been friends, sometimes rivalrous ones, since graduate school; they studied together at the University of Michigan and were congressional fellows together in 1969. Their personal politics are left-of-center, but, as they declare at the beginning of the book, their strongest partisanship is institutional. "For us," they write, "Congress has always been the first branch." Their devotion to Congress has won them admirers from all points on the political spectrum. A blurb from former Republican speaker of the House Newt Gingrich makes the point: "Mann and Ornstein understand well the glaring gap between the framers' design and today's reality."

The Founding Fathers quite deliberately described Congress in the first article of the Constitution, the presidency in the second. The authors of a revolution designed to overthrow a monarch did not want to put a comparably powerful chief executive officer in the king's place. Congress, explicitly granted the power to raise and spend money, was to have the upper hand.

Over more than two centuries of American history, the founders' intention to create a strong legislature has repeatedly been tested -- and sometimes evaded, as in recent years. Until now, the pendulum has always swung back toward the Capitol after periods of unusually strong White House influence. Mann and Ornstein fervently want this to happen again; their book explains why they consider this so important and provides some ideas for how it might happen. But fundamental change will not come from tinkering reforms, they argue; only angry voters can force the House and Senate to correct themselves.

Their account of the recent decline of Congress, and particularly the House, is scathing but difficult to dispute. They blame a poisonously partisan division in both houses and in the country for much of today's congressional bickering and irrelevance. Partisan warfare led Republicans to cater to "the base," the country's most conservative Republicans, which explains the House's bizarre agenda in July. Mann and Ornstein trace the origins of partisan warfare back to the 1980s, when a contemptuous Democratic majority dominated the House without any fear or expectation that the Republicans would ever regain control. But Gingrich's forces did, of course, leading first to the spectacle of a wholly partisan impeachment of a sitting president and then to the first period of extended GOP control of both Congress and the White House since the 1920s.

"The arrival of unified Republican government in 2001 transformed the aggressive and active GOP-led Congress of the Clinton years into a deferential and supine body, one extremely reluctant to demand information, scrub presidential proposals, or oversee the executive," Mann and Ornstein write. "The uncompromising assertion of executive authority by President Bush and Vice President Cheney was met with a whimper, not a principled fight, by the Republican Congress." The authors write contemptuously of House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and his willingness to ignore House rules and traditions to ram through legislation to please the White House.

History is often ignored or forgotten in contemporary America, but not by Mann and Ornstein. Their argument is strengthened by their ability to put it in historical context, to demonstrate how far the current Congress has wandered from the legislature's traditional and constitutional role. Unfortunately, Mann and Ornstein let their own history complicate their narrative by repeatedly quoting their earlier writings. Their editor did them no favor by permitting these self-citations, which create a "We told you so" tone not conducive to making, or winning, an argument.

Even so, it is easy to recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Congress, how it works and how it should work. Hastert would be particularly well-served by spending a few hours with The Broken Branch. And if, as Mann recently predicted in The Post's Outlook section, Democrats win control of the House in November, this book will suddenly be useful to both parties: to the Democrats as a cautionary tale and a useful blueprint, to the Republicans as an insight into where they went wrong.

Reviewed by Robert G. Kaiser
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; annotated edition edition (August 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195174461
• ISBN-13: 978-0195174465
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #390,701 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Power Corrupts; Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, August 28, 2006

By	!Edwin C. Pauzer (New York City) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein bring to light what many Americans don't know, or don't care to know. The legislative branch of government, the House of Representatives and the Senate have long ago stopped serving the constituents they were elected to serve.

In this searing story that will scare the republic out of you, the authors tell how the Congress of yesteryear, the Congress that would negotiate, debate, compromise, represent the will of their constituents, and the best interest of the country, are a dying breed.

They have been replaced by congressmen and women who have allowed lobbyists to write the bills for the special interests they represent. They have cajoled party members to vote strictly along party lines at the expense of constituent representation and independent thought. They have introduced bills hundreds of pages long with little or no time for debate or compromise, let alone time to read its provisions. They have introduced bills late at night demanding an up or down vote. Having complained long and loud about democratic pork, the republican congress has increased "earmarks" from hundreds to the thousands. And this is the laziest congress in years, working less than 100 days a year.

Leading the charge of congressional dysfunction are Sennsenbrenner, Frist, Hastert and Delay. Sennsenbrenner allowed the credit card industry to write the new bankruptcy bill. Sennsenbrenner wouldn't allow any amendments that would have allowed veterans to keep their homes or seniors to keep theirs in the face of astronomical medical bills. Hastert removed a congressman from the Ethics committee because he was investigating Delay. Delay demanded that lobbying firms replace their democrat lobbyists with republican ones if they wanted to be "allowed in." Then there's Frist. For the first time, Frist, a senator, went to another state to campaign against the democrat incumbent.

As for that bridge to nowhere, in Alaska, that was going to connect to a community of 50 at a cost of $22 million. Well, congress rescinded it, but gave the same amount of money to the state which has made it clear they intend to build it anyway. Then, there is the $10 billion of pork that congress made great fanfare about removing from the highway bill. What the average American doesn't realize is that they added an additional $10 billion just before they removed it. This was legislative sleight-of-hand.

Mann and Ornstein's strongest assertion is that Congress has failed as an independent branch of government. They claim they are subservient to the Executive branch and Mr. Bush. They do his bidding. The loss of billions of dollars in Iraq, money the legislature authorized for Afghanistan that was used in Iraq (an impeachable offense,) and the sluggish reaction to Hurricane Katrina have not generated any calls from a republican Congress for full and independent investigations.

This is a book that should be read by every American so he or she might awaken from their somnambulistic, political indifference. It is the average American who is allowing his and her rights to be trampled upon by apathy and ignorance.

The number of recent congressional and lobbying scandals give the book its credibility and validity. It also gives something else validity--

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

33 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Accurate analysis of the current state of national politics, August 1, 2006

By	birdmanct (West Hartford, CT USA) - See all my reviews

I just watched a two hour panel on BookTV.org, CSPAN2. The panelists were the two authors, Newt Gingrich, and Tom Foley, the Democrat Speaker of the House before Newt. All were in agreement with the premise of this book: that the House has become a tool of the Executive branch, and has abrogated it's oversight duty. Bills are devised in the dead of night without bipartisan or even intra-party debate, simply to implement White House policy. Leader PACs and fund-raising are the key duties of our representatives. I was shocked to hear that the House has cut its in-session time from three days a week to one, as most members fly into DC on Tuesday night and out on Thursday morning. Most of the time they spend in DC is with lobbyists. This leaves no time for discussion or even reading the bills they are voting on. It leaves no time to get to talk with and to know the other Congressmen, or to hear dissenting views, and leads to the passage of flawed bills and acrimony with their colleagues.

Scariest of all is the invocation of war powers in a war that probably will not end in our lifetimes, at a time when the House, Senate, White House, and Supreme Court are all dominatted by one party. We could be just one terrorist attack away from a dictatorship. This book is a must-read for politicians, political scientists, reporters, and voters. Congress is neglecting its duty, and the American people are neglecting theirs by not voting and by not thinking about the issues that this book raises.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Insight to a Major Problem, August 18, 2006

By	Loyd E. Eskildson "Pragmatist" (Phoenix, AZ.) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The "broken branch" Mann refers to is Congress' House of Representatives. He has concluded that a majority of today's Republicans in Congress see themselves more as foot soldiers in the President's army than as members of an independent branch of government. Serious congressional oversight of the executive branch has largely disappeared. This is NOT an exclusively Republican phenomena - arrogance, greed, venality, and condescension towards the minority were significant evidence prior to the Republican takeover in '94; however, since President Bush took office these practices have been raised to new levels.

Passage of the Medicare drug benefit in the House serves as the authors' prime example of abuse. The vote was held open for 2 hours, 51 minutes - far beyond the normal 15 minutes. This extension allowed enough pressure, threats and bribes to achieve passage. (In the 22 years Democrats ran the House after electronic voting, it only happened once - and that in a seemingly justifiable instance. The Republicans did it at least a dozen times both before and after the Medicare vote.) In addition, Democrats were left out of the bill's drafting (as were most Republicans - it was created in a special committee, without hearings), as well as most of the conference committee Democrats. Further, it (like many other key bills) was brought to a floor vote under closed rules (members cannot offer amendments - this has occurred 2-3X as often under Republican leadership), and without time to even read the legislation. There was also the issue of inaccurate cost estimates provided to help sell the bill. The authors then go on to argue that the House has become polarized by extreme gerrymandering that gives inordinate power to extremists in both parties.

Framers of the Constitution intended that Congress be first among equals of the three branches - it can override a veto, change the size and jurisdiction of the courts, and remove presidents and justices. Standing committees were created in the 1700s, partly to provide sources of independent information and expertise vs. eg. the Treasury Secretary at the time - Alexander Hamilton. By 1969 it had evolved into a collection of barons (committee chairs) who had near full control of committee resources and the flow of legislation to the floor, were selected in ironclad fashion by seniority, and were virtually immune from removal. They could also hire/fire the committee staff, set jurisdiction of subcommittees, select members of conference committees, and control debate on the floor when committee matters came up. Nearly all key committee meetings were closed and without recorded votes. In 1971 cracks began to appear in their power - a vote on any chair nominee was allowed if ten members demanded, and members were limited to sub-committee chairmanship apiece - preventing the chairman from just using a few select allies.

After Newt Gingrich arrived, Republicans began offering regular floor amendments designed to put the Democrats in embarrassing positions for use as campaign fodder; then there was also the C-SPAN tactic of pretending to challenge Democrats in the evening and not receive any response - therefore they must be guilty as charged. Party politics were further acerbated when the Republicans began refusing to work with Democrats after Clinton was elected, at least partly in response to a series of Democrat abuses that had seriously offended the Republicans.

Upon assuming the Speaker's position, Gingrich used the power associated with his Contract with America to centralize power (name committee chairs), limit chairmanship tenure, assign committee members, set committee agendas, and create leadership task forces to write key legislation - bypassing House committees. The result greatly reduced the amount and quality of deliberation.

After President Bush's 2000 election, rules and ideas about fairness were trumped by a desire to produce results for the president, Bush's push for executive secrecy and the withholding of executive branch information, the Senate's overturning precedent using a parliamentary procedure to allow ending filibusters of judicial appointments (Bush did not consult with the ranking Democratic member of the Judiciary, nor the "home-state senators" as Clinton had done), and DeLay's threats to withhold campaign funding help for non-cooperative members or even run alternative candidates in primaries and use of earmarks to threaten/bribe members.

The authors ultimately conclude that while the "good old days" weren't all that good, things have gotten a lot worse, and they then offer a number of suggestions for improvement.