Scarborough Hits Back At Guests: You’re Acting As If Dems Are ‘Only Keepers Of Honesty And Truth’
On Thursday, Morning Joe welcomed authors Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein onto the show to discuss their new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.
As the discussion turned to clashes between the two major parties and the “tribal politics” they partake in, host Joe Scarborough called out the two men for “acting as if the Democrats are the only keepers of honesty and truth.”
Earlier, Mann had opined that “all the talk about bipartisanship… ‘we must bring them together and build consensus’ is nonsense. Sadly, it’s nonsense,” because “given the nature of the parties,” it simply doesn’t ever happen. He suggested that a “political monopoly,” as Scarborough described it, by one party would be a solid, temporary solution to getting the country out of its “political morass.” The Democratic party, he argued, had become a “center-left party” since Bill Clinton’s presidency, while Republicans have veered “sharply to the right.”
The three continued to disagree, prompting Scarborough to hit the brakes:
Wait a minute, stop. How in the world can you say that? I’m sorry, I like both of you guys. Hold on. This is so one-sided, though. You ignore in 1995 what we did in 1995 with Democrats screaming and yelling that we were throwing senior citizens out of the street and killing little babies. You had us saving medicare when the medicare trustees said that medicare was going bankrupt and Bill Clinton shamelessly demagoguing it. You had one fight after another. John Kasich passing the first balanced budget plan in a generation. I mean, you guys are acting as if the Democrats are the only keepers of honesty and truth. How can you not say the 1990s weren’t bipartisan and it wasn’t both parties coming together to do good things?
“You had some bipartisanship, certainly, for a period,” replied Ornstein. “But you also had [former House Speaker] Newt set the scenes for the tribal politics that followed. We had impeachment, which took us away what we were right at, a Social Security solution, was bipartisan. I remember Clay Shaw [Jr.] almost crying because we couldn’t get to that point. And then moved on from there with what became the parliamentary process that ’93-94 brought in. Look at them now. You don’t have anybody who’s willing to work across the aisle.”
Scarborough later laughed when Mann proposed that, “Republicans came around after trying to shut government down” in the 90s.
Looking back at 1997, Scarborough pointed out that “Democrats raised holy hell. You would have thought that we were kicking down doors we throwing grandma’s and young kids into the street. We were compared to Bull Connor — you talked a lot about extremism on the right — we were compared to Bull Connor because we wanted school lunch programs to grow by 4 percent instead of 6 percent. I mean, and i think until we admit that whatever party is out of power in Washington these days is too extreme, rhetoric is too red hot and they’ll do anything to get into power, i don’t think this is a persuasive government.”
Have a look at their discussion, via MSNBC:
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