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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Lots of members have been appalled at the kind of Gilded Age mentality of the party. Others felt like they had to take one for the team.
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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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My understanding is that now, after taking soundings, he's thinking about running for leader.
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Let's face it. When you're the governor of New York and even mentioned as a presidential candidate, you're going to be under an enormous microscope.
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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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You have smart people and a lot of money at stake. People are going to find loopholes.
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The pending complaint on DeLay was on the Texas case (over political fund raising),
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When you have a dramatic expansion of the ability of individual members to direct federal funds or to designate contracts, you are creating the most fertile environment for corruption imaginable.
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What she did just makes you cringe. It's clearly unethical by any standard.
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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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If you passed a steroids bill now while letting the deficit careen out of control and not doing much to get Iraq on track, they would attract a lot of ridicule for spending their time on it,