- A lot of Americans believe our politics are broken.

Today's guest says the fault lies squarely with one political party that will likely shape the course of the Biden administration.

He's Dr. Norman Ornstein this week at Story in the Public Square.

(gentle music) Hello and welcome to Story in the Public Square where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

Alongside me is my friend and co-host, G. Wayne Miller of the Providence Journal.

Each week, we talk about big issues with great guests, authors, journalists, scholars and more to make sense of the big stories shaping public life in the United States today.

This week we're joined by a true student of American politics and governance.

Dr. Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and he joins us today from Washington DC.

Norm, thank you so much for being with us.

- [Norm] It's a pleasure.

- So you have a reputation as one of the more non-partisan more sensible scholars of American politics and governance working today describe for the public what you do.

- So I'm a political scientist and I've been in Washington mostly either at universities or think tanks for a little more than 50 years now.

I started after I got my PhD, I actually taught in Italy for a year, went to Catholic university here then to Johns Hopkins and to the American Enterprise Institute where I write books and columns and articles, I do some television and radio analysis of politics, policy, the parties and generally even more broadly now the social fabric and how it interacts with the political system.

- Oh and I think we're gonna get into most if not all of that here today, but you have a record of just really wonderful books.

I think back to the 2000 book, "The Permanent Campaign" your couple of books with your collaborator, Tom Mann "The Broken Branch" in 2006.

And It's Even Worse Than It Looks in 2012 as well as the book that you and Tom coauthored with E.J.

Dionne, "One Nation After Trump" in 2017.

Where you describe the in very broad terms, a lot of the dysfunction that plagues American politics.

Sort of in a nutshell, what's the problem we're dealing with today?

- So it's a multi-faceted problem, of course.

And I wanna start by saying that Tom Mann and I over a 50 year period, worked a lot with members of Congress and people in administrations on political reform across both parties.

We tried very much to get Congress working the way it was supposed to.

Whether it was ethics or the nature of the committee system or staffing, we worked a lot on campaign finance reform and the like.

What we saw over the last 20 years was a steady and significant erosion in the norms of governance that started in Washington and metastasized out to the states and to the public as a whole, that interacted of course with a couple of other very important factors.

One was all of the technological change going on.

So for example, the rise of political talk radio which really started in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s.

That coincided with another phenomenon which was economic dislocation that we saw back in that era that met a rise in populism and those things interacted.

And of course, as we saw talk radio move into cable television, and then into social media all of those things interacted.

On the political front, we point a lot of the onus, I would say on Newt Gingrich.

We met Newt in 1979, right after he came to Congress.

And at that point, Democrats had had a stranglehold on the majority in the House of Representatives.

24 consecutive years, Newt had his entire focus on how they could break that stranglehold.

And his idea was you had to tribalize our politics and he did it.

And it interacted with that populism, the reaction against the elites with the ability to use those new tribal (indistinct) and it took him 16 years, but he accomplished that goal but it really did the nature of our politics.

And what we saw emerging after that, Jim, in particular form as we moved through the 1990s, the Clinton era, but really accelerating with the Obama era was a Republican party that moved dramatically in a more (indistinct) direction.

Polarized we've seen that, of course but as they tribalized, the polarization was asymmetric.

And what we've seen emerge in the Trump era is a reflection of that.

And it really gets back to, I would say, the erosion of the fundamental norms of governance.

One of the most important things we have to talk about is that you can have a constitution, you can have laws, you can have rules, but it's almost like you have an exoskeleton and the norms are the cartilage and the ligaments that keep it all together.

If you don't have those, the skeleton collapses and we've seen this erosion of norms and I would say much of it proceeded Donald Trump.

It created the conditions for him to rise.

Mitch McConnell is another one of the accelerants here.

And Trump has clearly provided that accelerant but we know right now we're at a phase and whether we can get out of it in a Biden presidency even as we see all of these lawsuits and attempts to undermine the impact of the election these are big questions for the country to answer.

- So why did the Republican party go in the direction that it did in the last silver years?

What were the factors involved there?

If you can give us a little more detail 'cause clearly they have moved in a different direction from historically where the party was.

- Yeah, so it's complicated, of course, as you might expect.

One thing to keep in mind is that for a long time our parties have been different in so many different ways but the democratic party has long been a coalition of different kinds of groups.

It's not just ethnic groups.

It's a variety of groups.

Coalitions are noisy, difficult.

Remember going back to that famous comment by the great humorous Will Rogers, "I'm not a member of any organized political party, "I'm a Democrat."

When you have a coalition you tend to have to make deals and pull things together.

The Republican's less a party of coalitions and more a party of ideology.

And ideology it's not that difficult to turn into a theology.

So that's one part of it.

A second part of it is that (indistinct) have for a long time for decades in this country, seen themselves as an oppressed minority.

Basically shunned and disregarded by the media and by the Academy.

And even by the sort of elite social network.

Now you could look at that today where they've held so many of the reigns of power where their media the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and others are at least as dominant as the so-called mainstream media.

Where if you look at the impact in the Academy, this notion that you have all professors who are indoctrinating the students and there's no real evidence of that.

And you have very powerful intellectual forces on the right, but that image, that sense of oppression continues to be the case of victimization.

And that's easily exploited by demagogues.

Then I think you throw in what has been happening in our culture and that includes the impact of the social media.

And frankly, I believe that we no longer have a political party with the Republican party.

The glue that kept a lot of them together, the anti-communism that had disparate forces working together disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union and it's more a cult than a party now.

And in a cult, the fear of being shunned or ex-communicated becomes a fairly dominant one.

So the ideas, the differences are not significant, the willingness to abide by the norms of governance are just not as great, and that sense of victimization added to this notion of tribalism.

So focus more on damaging the evil people who are trying to destroy our way of life, the Democrats.

No matter how you accomplish it the ends justifies the means attitude has become a more dominant one.

Now it's not to say that it will always be the case or that the other side consists of wonderful angels who always operate in the right way.

There's always a danger that as the kind of Newtonian force as one side moves more towards an extreme, the other one will as well.

But if we look over the last 20 years, the dominant feature of the decline in norms in the society and in the political arena has come from Republicans.

- Norm, you talk about the erosion of political norms and the norms of governance.

I wonder, is that anything that when we think about specifically in the context of the Office of the President.

And Donald Trump, I think by most accounts has really continued the erosion of normative behavior by presidents.

Is that something that can be countered or balanced with new legislation?

Or is this something where we're really dependent upon the goodwill and beneficence of the people who hold that office?

- So of course we can change the laws in some way.

For example, to strengthen the ethics process in the executive branch.

You could require presidents to release tax returns to pick one example.

You could strengthen through the laws, some elements of the constitution that have been violated over and over by Trump.

The emoluments clauses, where we have no easy way to enforce them.

Every time we had cases brought up in the courts they've basically said, "No, we can't deal with this."

Or "You don't have standing to deal with it."

But you can't legislate morality all the time.

And one of the great challenges Jim, that I would say that we have now is we have going forward, that there's a really good and thoughtful article in the new issue of the Atlantic, by James Fallows on this.

We get a lot of people saying, "All right, we need a truth and reconciliation commission "to go back over all of the violations of laws and norms "done in the Trump administration."

And others saying in a banana republic is where you punish your political enemies after they've lost and you've won.

But the reality is if you (indistinct) in norms.

And the center for responsibility and ethics in Washington did a report in September.

3,500 violations within the Trump administration as of then, and we're gonna see many more.

25,000 or more allies by Trump with the number going up daily.

If you don't hold some of that accountable, if what you say is you can get away with all that because when you leave, there's nothing that we can do.

And some of it may be dealt with, unfortunately by (radio interference drowns out speaker) which is president Trump using his pardon power to pardon everybody who might've been engaged in any of these things.

And you can do under the constitution and the interpretation that we've had blanket pardons for any offenses that might've occurred.

We're left in a position where we've gotta find ways to hold at least some of this accountable.

What I would do probably is I would try and make sure that in the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department and the Southern District of New York, two entities that have long had a reputation for being purely focused on the law and with integrity get career officials who've never contributed any money to anybody and have an attorney general and a president who say, "I'm out of this.

"I'm not gonna deal with it.

"I want these career people to follow the evidence "and the chips fall where they may."

That may be the best way to deal with this.

What I worry about is that if you look at what's happened over the last four years and the coverage by the media of these things, we have had one scandal fended off by another scandal and another scandal and another scandal.

(radio interference drowns out speaker) television network or you are a newspaper.

There's a certain amount of bandwidth, a certain amount in the column inches that you will devote to stories of this sort.

And if you have one a day or two a day, people get deadened to it and you don't give it the same kind of attention.

And for a public that doesn't focus a lot on these things on a day-to-day basis, the way a scandal penetrates is when the signals that come from the people you trust, this is real, this is important, we need to deal with it, which comes from day after day after day, focusing on something, you lose all of that.

One of the things that I worry about is that we could end up with a Biden administration that is as pristine as any that we've had.

We did that with the Obama administration.

They're still gonna devote the same amount of bandwidth to scandal even if there isn't much there.

Some people have called this, the tan suit phenomenon.

You remember that when Barack Obama wore a tan suit, it got a huge amount of attention.

Presidents should wear gray or navy and tan is demeaning the office.

If that's what we end up doing back to doing again we're gonna loose (radio interference drowns out speaker) to recognize that there are a lot of differences administrations have done and what congresses have tolerated.

And that's the other part of the story here that I think we really need to mention.

The framers knew that we could end up with a president or an administration that was corrupt or that put their own personal interests over those of the nation as a whole.

And they deliberately built in these checks and balances that start with an independent Congress.

When the Congress doesn't do its job, and that includes using the power of the purse, the sentence, power of confirmation.

Investigative power to hold an administration accountable.

It can corinne completely out of control.

And here the failure of the House and Senate in the first two years of the Trump presidency.

The Senate under McConnell and Lindsey Graham and all the others who chaired committees in the last two years is a core part of the problem that we have here.

- I think you make a very powerful argument regarding TV, newspapers and what they've chosen to cover.

I buy it a hundred percent.

But practically speaking given first amendment, given the traditions of this country, how can that be changed?

How can you get to the editors, the producers, and people and make the argument that you just may very eloquently.

- So it's been made by many, besides me, Jay Rosen at NYU, James Fallows at the Atlantic and others have way.

We've seen a few small changes but the fact is you can only use the kind of pressure that comes from outside.

Now, I think we also have to mention the other phenomenon here that's even more difficult to deal with Wayne.

And that is the way in which tribal media and social media can, two phenomenon.

The first is people can cocoon in and get the information from sources they want and trust.

I'll circle back to one of the things that I said earlier.

Conservatives who felt the sense of victimization are even more inclined to go to the kind of media that reinforce what they believe.

And then they believe things that aren't necessarily true and it gets completely reinforced.

We see this now with the fact that 75% or more of Republicans believe because of what they've been told in the media that they trust and because of what the president has said, that the election was fraudulent.

Now that's part of another phenomenon which is that clever pernicious people like the QAnon forces can also perpetrate conspiracy theories and absolute falsehoods that come to be believed by large numbers of people.

And they can act in a fashion that is very very dangerous to the society.

So all of these things combined.

The so-called mainstream media, which are trying to follow the norms that they've always followed.

One of which is you report both sides of a story, but if you say that everything is balanced, a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon, distorts reality and the other is tribal media whose business models work best when they perpetrate tribalism, division and often falsehoods.

These are things that are gonna last for a long time.

And it isn't clear that we have any good ways to counter them, to bring us back to what the framers wanted, what we should have which is sharing a common set of facts and working to use those to solve a common set of problems but also having a political system where you have partisanship that's baked into it but doesn't turn to a belief that people on the other side are evil because that's what can lead to secular conflict and division in a way too many societies can tear it apart.

- Norm, we're taping this in the middle of December.

So before we know what's gonna happen with the Senate runoffs in Georgia but even with that caveat, what do you expect of president Biden's first 100 days and beyond?

- So at this point, the main thing that we don't know other than how this will play out on January 6th when the new Congress convene as convened and counts the electoral votes is what happens on January 5th with those two Georgia Senate runoff elections.

It's a stunning phenomenon but the differences are night and day.

If Democrats were to win those two seats, which viewers will know by the time they see this.

Democrats, even though it will only be a 50-50 Senate which means the vice president coming in on January 20th Kamala Harris will have a tie-breaking vote.

That means that they control the agenda.

They have the majority leader in a position to be able to decide what comes up or what has come up.

They will control the committees and the agenda of the committees and they will control the nomination confirmation process.

So what that means is that President Biden could be pretty much assured that most of his key nomination move forward expeditiously and he'll have an administration in place.

It means that some of the goals he would like to accomplish in his first hundred days.

Moving on health care reform to make the affordable care act work better.

Maybe get a public option to be able to do a major COVID relief package beyond whatever was accomplished before he became president.

An economic stimulus, is the economy still foundering with COVID and a big infrastructure package that has bipartisan support.

You can bring those up, frame them and be able to get votes on them.

You can do that through a process called reconciliation which is a sort of arcane budget feature but which guarantees an upper down vote with a majority and not of having a filibuster to block those things which Republicans, if they are in the minority could do.

If they don't have the majority, Mitch McConnell decides what comes up.

The committees can hold hearings over and over on that are of the Benghazi variety on Hunter Biden and Burisma and the original Russia investigation and so on to try and hamstring you.

And if that's the case, other than trying to (indistinct) that big COVID relief economic stimulus infrastructure package that might be able to come up in the Senate, mostly Biden is gonna be able to do is an executive fund.

And that will mean executive action some of which he signaled early on.

Rejoining the World Health Organization, getting a much broader international cooperation on this pandemic and future ones, rejoining the Paris Climate Accords and trying to use the regulatory process to change the way we deal with climate.

Reorganizing the department of Homeland Security and changing the way we deal with refugees, reinforcing the dreamers act and doing other things on the regulatory front.

But that's a challenge for him.

And in particular, if there's a Republican Senate because his ability to get rid of some of the regulations and executive actions written by Trump will be significantly hindered.

If you can't use what's called the congressional review act to have Congress just quickly erase those regulations and leave you with a clean slate at least for things done within the past six months.

So that's the key for him.

And then I would just mention one other caveat here which is the executive actions and Trump, of course has used those extensively.

Are things that might be curtailed by the Supreme Court to promulgate regulations if they weren't explicitly authorized in the law.

And if they start to curtail the ability of an executive to act or even move to what could be the kind of pre-new deal era where Congress can't take bold steps because they say the Commerce Clause is to be applied only narrowly we're in a very different ballgame.

We can't ignore the court and the ability that Mitch McConnell has had to dramatically alter the check and balance of that third branch, the not just the Supreme Court but other levels of the judiciary.

- So again, bearing in mind that we are taping this the second week of December does it matter that president Trump has not conceded the election that he has announced no plans to attend the inauguration.

Does any of that matter at this point?

- [Jim] You got about 30 seconds for this one Norm.

- Yes it does.

And where it matters is not in whether Joe Biden can assume the presidency, but in the fact that 30 to 40% of Americans will believe his presidency is illegitimate.

And a large number of members of Congress will be on record with that.

And that's gonna make governing more difficult and it will make any tough steps harder to implement.

And it'll mean even some of the things he wants to do with COVID relief are gonna be resisted by a large share of the population.

It's big.

- Norm, we are so grateful to you for sharing some of your expertise with us.

He's Norm Ornstein with the American Enterprise Institute.

That's all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about Story in the Public Square, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more Story in the Public Square.

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