Norm Ornstein is a correspondent for The Atlantic, a contributing editor and columnist for National Journal, and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. More
Ornstein served as codirector of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project and participates in AEI's Election Watch series. He also serves as a senior counselor to the Continuity of Government Commission. Ornstein led a working group of scholars and practitioners that helped shape the law, known as McCain-Feingold, that reformed the campaign financing system. He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. His many books include The Permanent Campaign and Its Future; The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track, with Thomas E. Mann; and, most recently the New York Times bestseller, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, also with Tom Mann.
Pushing back on abuses by a small but powerful faction of the criminal-justice system requires a bipartisan coalition.
From ISIS to inversions, immigration to infrastructure, a host of pressing needs face legislators. Of course, that doesn't mean they'll take any action.
Failure to fix the nation's transportation-funding system would be the latest economic wound inflicted on the country by the feckless 113th Congress.
Just how far out is the Republican fringe?
The news about the health-care law is all positive these days—but a few bad breaks in conservative courts could change all that.
Congress's proposal to fix the broken agency risks taking the country back to the patronage-job system of the 19th century.
Watching big companies abandoning corporate citizenship shows the flaw in the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision.
It's been a year since the Supreme Court gutted the law, and racial justice remains elusive.
Don't be fooled by a new report from the Pew Research Center. Both sides are more politicized these days, but it's not equal.
It's not just Eric Cantor. Reformist conservatives have good ideas, but until they drop the idea that all government is bad, they'll never be realistic.
The next head of the Department of Veterans Affairs needs to be a skilled administrator rather than a decorated soldier.
The best solution to the increasingly politicized and unseasoned Court is to limit justices to 18-year terms.
From the defeat of a bipartisan energy bill to an endangered judicial nominee, Republican obstruction in the Senate hasn't stopped since Harry Reid invoked the "nuclear option."
There are strong ideas on the table that transcend ideology and would strengthen the nation. Yet they're going nowhere.
Even if the Republican is sincere in his outreach to the poor, his spending plan would hurt the neediest Americans by cutting the programs on which they rely.
Obama isn't stalled out because he can't lead like Johnson, Reagan, or Clinton—it's because the nature of the opposition party has changed.
The Supreme Court's ruling on campaign finance means that all but the most blatant corruption is likely to escape the law's scrutiny.
PED use in baseball merited a Congressional hearing. A similar investigation should be probing into educational institutions' use of athletics and athletes for profit.
The ranks of civil servants face miserable brain drain if Congress persists with pay freezes, benefit cuts, and badmouthing dedicated employees.
A winning midterm would encourage the GOP's worst impulses toward obstruction, hearten the 2016 presidential field, and bottle up Obama nominees.
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