Congress back on track? Not yet, says Congressional Scholar Thomas E. Mann

On Tuesday, August 17, the Glenn School's Washington Office hosted a reception at the Phoenix Park Hotel to honor the 15 participants in the Summer 2010 Washington Academic Internship Program. A number of internship supervisors, mentors, and local alumni were in attendance.

The program featured Thomas E. Mann, holder of the W. Averell Harriman Chair in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and co-author, with Norman Ornstein, of The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get it Back on Track, one of the textbooks in our public policy seminar.

Dr. Mann was educated at the University of Florida and the University of Michigan. He came to Washington forty years ago as a Congressional Fellow in the offices of Senator Philip A. Hart and Representative James G. O’Hara, and apparently he never looked back. He quickly became an expert on Congressional procedures and the history of the institution. He calls himself a “hardcore partisan” of Congress and of the legislative process generally, and he ranks among the wisest and most approachable of Washington's talking heads. Among the many accolades bestowed on Dr. Mann is the Glenn School’s Excellence in Public Service Award, which he won in 2006.

We asked him to share his thoughts about whether, a year and a half into the Obama Administration, Congress is getting “back on track.” Dr. Mann argued that while the branch is still "broken," the 111th Congress accomplished a great deal more than the public is inclined to give it credit for. The Washington Buckeye found that entirely persuasive, though one can imagine a legislature being so broken that a "Do Nothing" Congress might actually be preferable to a productive one.