Norman Ornstein
Norman Ornstein
Norman J. Ornsteinis a political scientist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington D.C. conservative think tank. He was the co-writerof It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
CountryUnited States of America
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What she did just makes you cringe. It's clearly unethical by any standard.
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To a large degree the durability of this compromise is going to depend on the actions of President Bush. He can keep it or blow it up. It depends on what kind of judges he nominates.
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We build people up who have positions of power or visibility and venerate them and then have to show they have feet of clay.
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It's the most expansive vision of the executive power of a president in our lifetime. To suggest that (Congress has) given him a blanket authority to do what he has done is a vast stretch.
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It's a self-perpetuating system involving interests, members of Congress, people in the executive branch and patronage positions and so on.
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It's a disaster for DeLay. They've not only formally started the process, but this is a public petition.
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What they've done, at least, is to give themselves a little breathing room from what was going to be a really ugly confrontation, and one that was a complete lose-lose for Republicans, no matter what.
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The pending complaint on DeLay was on the Texas case (over political fund raising),
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You have smart people and a lot of money at stake. People are going to find loopholes.
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Conservatives want smaller government. They want to focus on market-based solutions wherever one can. They want to have as little regulation as possible. But in general, they recognize that government must play an important role for a society to operate.
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The best way to get your audience larger and more consistent is to be more divisive and more radical and criticize those who cater to or kowtow to other forces.
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Radicals don't care about the institutions. They are looking for an ideological crusade. Traditions don't matter.
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Government is inevitably going to play a very significant role in infrastructure, and in a country with a federal system where vibrancy and economic health depend on interstate commerce, it's not going to be private enterprise or state governments that will give you things like an interstate highway system.
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There's a sense that there is a culture of cronyism and corruption and incompetence