Broken
Can the Senate Save Itself and the Country?
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- $43.99
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- $43.99
Publisher Description
While the hyper-partisanship in Washington that has stunned the world has been building for decades, Ira Shapiro argues that the U.S. Senate has suffered most acutely from the loss of its political center.
In Broken, Ira Shapiro, a former senior Senate staffer and author of the critically-acclaimed book The Last Great Senate, offers an expert’s account of some of the most prominent battles of the past decade and lays out what must be done to restore the Senate’s lost luster. Shapiro places the Senate at “ground zero for America’s political dysfunction”--the institution that has failed the longest and the worst. Because the Senate, at its best, represented the special place where the Democrats and Republicans worked together to transcend ideological and regional differences and find common ground, its decline has intensified the nation’s polarization, by institutionalizing it at the highest level. Shapiro documents this decline and evaluates the prospects of restoration that could provide a way out of the polarized morass that has engulfed Congress.
With a narrative that runs right through the first year of the Trump presidency, Broken will be essential reading for all concerned about the state of American politics and the future of our country.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shapiro (The Last Great Senate), a former trade negotiator for the Clinton administration, examines headline-making political battles dating back to the 1970s in this engrossing overview of the Senate's decline into what he characterizes as hyperpartisanship. In talking about the obstruction tactics that he says have eroded public trust in a formerly respected and reliably bipartisan institution, the author takes the impassioned tone of an anguished parent watching his beloved children fail to live up to their potential. Part one focuses on the implementation of obstructionist tactics that are now firmly entrenched and wielded with ferocity. Shapiro sees them originating with the New Right ideologues who came to power with Reagan, and reaching a nadir under Senate Majority Leaders Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, who cared more about "partisan warfare" than the "health of the institution." Part two looks at Trump's first months in office, and though the assessment is bleak, it's never hopeless. Although "procedural frailty" in Senate rules has led to a state of gridlock, the Senate could fix itself, Shapiro writes, as one of its major strengths is its agility: "Bipartisan action can happen in swift and surprising terms." Written to inform and to exhort, Shapiro's work is a fast-paced narrative that moderates will appreciate.
