"...With Congress back in session this week — and the mean-spirited wrangling about to begin anew — I thought it would be useful to ask Cooper how Congress became so dysfunctional. His answer surprised me. He said almost nothing about the Tea Party. Instead, he focused on the internal dynamics of Congress itself.
To Cooper, the true villain is not the Tea Party; it’s Newt Gingrich. In the 1980s, when Tip O’Neill was speaker of the House, “Congress was functional,” Cooper told me. “Committees worked. Tip saw his role as speaker of the whole House, not just the Democrats.”
Gingrich was a new kind of speaker: deeply partisan and startlingly power-hungry. “His first move was to get rid of the Democratic Study Group, which analyzed bills, and which was so trusted that Republicans as well as Democrats relied on it,” Cooper recalled. “This was his way of preventing us from knowing what we were voting on. Today,” he added, “the ignorance around here is staggering. Nobody has any idea what they’re voting on.”
In the O’Neill era, when an important issue was being debated, there were often several legislative alternatives. But, under Gingrich, “that was eliminated in favor of one partisan bill,” said Cooper. That continued after the Democrats retook the House in 2006. “We no longer search for the best ideas or the best policies,” he said. “There was only one health care bill offered. One Dodd-Frank. Now you are either an ally or a traitor.”
Cooper was rolling now. “The real problem with big issues like Medicare is that both parties have to be brave at the same time,” he said. “Every pollster will tell you not to do that to get partisan advantage.
Too many people here are willing to deliberately harm the country for partisan gain.
That is borderline treason."
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