...for those that want to hear Orstein and Mann preach to the choir.

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Please join us Friday, May 18 at noon in the IGS library (109 Moses Hall), for a special session of the Research Workshop on American Politics with authors Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein. As always lunch will be served.

Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institution, have observed Washington politics for more than 40 years — and they're acclaimed for their carefully nonpartisan positions.

Now, they say, Congress is more dysfunctional than it has been since the Civil War, and they know who to blame.

"One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition," they write in their new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism.

Books will be on sale at the event. To read more about their findings in advance please see their Washington Post editorial introducing the book, or check out the excerpt available from NPR.

• http://igs.berkeley.edu/show_news.php