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[applause] >> thank you, jamie. thank you, jamie, for that very kind introduction. it is largely inaccurate but that is okay. i worked hard at getting that reputation as being in a so be and you demolished it in ten seconds. decades of hard work has gone by the wayside. thanks, i am supposed to talk about america's challenge, i went to the jackson panel, the title was jackson, then and now and john meacham said he vaguely remembered having emailed that title from somewhere in the backseat of a car someplace so i feel america's challenge is similarly broad. with jamie's advice and counsel i am going to talk about where

we are and where we ought to be focused and then answer a couple questions. we really are in a weird place as a country. not the first time we have been here but we are at a place where our politics seem broken and we are undergoing a moment of populism. i talked about it in the previous panel. i will shut my remarks for those re. we have gone through a period of 15, 16, 17 years in which trust in our institutions of government have been declining, particularly after the financial crisis, there's a belief that the relationship between the ordinary person and the government has been broken and needs to be rebalanced. on the left it is the big boys, the banks and the billionaires getting their piece of the action and the little man is getting screwed and we have to rebalance that relationship to

take from those who have too much to give to those who have too little. on the right there is a believe the government is in bed with people who have a loophole, the lobbyists and n somehow they are taking money out of the pockets of hard-working americans and giving it to undeserving institutions whether it is the big banks or solyndra or somebody. these concerns have grown worse and they are not just economic in nature. there is an economic populism which generally is seen on the left but also exists on the right but there is also a cultural populism which believe somehow the country on the right is moving too rapidly, changing too much, it will become something it wasn't in the past and on the left that the country is not moving fast enough and has to reach its true nature it is being held back by forces that have gotten too much influence over things endlessly that's to a tribal moment and we are in a tribal moment. if you are a democrat and your

leader is attacked whether you agree with the leader or not you defend him and if you are a republican in your leader is attacked you defend him regardless. the number of people who are truly pliable, the 2 independents who swing from one side to another has been shrinking for the last 30 years but particularly the last 15 or 22 where in the last election less than one in every 11 americans was truly undecided as it came down to the election a weekly linked to the choice they had to vote for. we had as a result of two stage weird election in 2016. the primaries on each side, 17 mostly accomplished people on the republican side including the governors, proven governors, the second and third most populous state in the union and gets one by a guy who's nen foruoffice before, who promises to take a break and throw it to the plate glass window and up and things in washington as they are. the previous panel applebaum

made the point hillary clinton was a candidate of the status quo and that's right. if you thought the country was going in the right direction you voted for hillary clinton by a margin of 89-8. the only problem was that was only 32% of the country and the rest of the people, the 60 some%, who thought the country was going in the wrong direction voted just enough for trump president. on the democratic side that was an unbelievable primary. she had lost her president obama in 2008 the party was united, the president was behind her and bernie sanders who has never made a mark in his years of congress or senate suddenly becomes the darling of the hard left of the democratic party, gets 47% of the vote and raises $230 million with emails and tweets and never attending a single fundraiser. you ask senator danforth how

many fundraisers he had to go through and it will bring on pts. but here's a guy who raises hundreds of millions of dollars by simply being and comes in with 47% of the vote and we go to that unusual general election where it turns out the democrats achieved the impossible, they nominated the one person in america who can lose to donald trump. in this election, in this election, 18% of the electorate thought neither person was qualified to be president of the united states, the highest percentage i have ever seen in any presidential election of people who think neither person is qualified to be president of the united states. they voted overwhelmingly for him because he was change. this is also the election with the highest percentage, the lowest percentage of people saying they would be comfortable if the other side won. we had a great tradition in our country, no matter how strong

the feeling was, if my guy loses i feel comfortable the country will be in good hands with the other person but in this election it was an all-time low of people who said of the other side wins the country will be all right. as a result we come into the general election where donald trump, 37% of the american electorate says i like him, i think he is qualified by experience and to permit to be president and he is a candidate of change and i'm voting for him, have a favorable opinion about him and i'm voting for him and 9% of the electorate says i don't like donald trump, don't think he is qualified by experience, to parental qualifications but he does represent change and i hate her, i'm voting for him. as a result with 11,000 votes in michigan 22,000 votes in wisconsin, and 44,000 vote margin in pennsylvania every one of those representing a 1% margin he becomes president of

the united states becoming the fifth person elected having received a majority of the electoral college and minority of the popular vote. as a result he has had little or no honeymoon. part of that is self-inflicted. he is also the first president in history, the modern age, never to get to 50% approval, never, not one day. his high mark was the day after he got inaugurated and his next high point close to that one or two points below was after the first so-called summit in singapore with little rocket man. but he has had authentic successes. the animal spirits of american congress was unleashed by his election, small business confidence, consumer confidence, hitting big levels, high levels we haven't seen in decades, regulatory relief that started almost from the beginning by stopping

and not doing things the cause people out in the real world to say i want to invest in jobs and plants and equipment and enterprise. tax reform. i'm a skeptic on the personal side of. if you told me there was a chance we would become, we were the only industrialized country in the world that didn't have a territorial tax system so if you made a product in the united states of america, let's say you were making medical equipment and sent it to germany and made a profit you paid attacks in germany on your profit and brought it home. if you wanted to bring it home to the united states you paid a second haircut but if you were a seaman and sold a piece of the common here you paid attacks on the profit here you could take that money home to germany without a second haircut. we had the highest corporate tax rate of almost any country

in the major industrialized countries and the only one without a territorial tax system so that we are trying to compete on the international stage with every american worker having one arm tied behind their back and we changed that. as a result these kind of things caused us to grow econally. 2016, economic growth, gdp in the entire year, 1.5%, we were told that was the new normal, that is how america was going to grow, slow growth, 2017, 2.3% growth, gross increased 50%, growth for 2018, quarter 12.2, quarter 33.5, estimate for the year is above 3.3, that means we are growing twice as fast as we are growing in 2016 and that means a real difference to a lot of people, that's not just a number. that means a job, that means a

paycheck. that means some confidence in the future, that means being able to take care of your family, maybe take them on a little vacation, put some money on the side for retirement or education. as a result we have unemployment, 3.9%, we will know tomorrow what it is as of historic lowest african-american unemployment rate since we began keeping track of those numbers by 1948. latino unemployment low. lots of people who have only a high school education now entering the workforce, workforce participation climbing back up because people finally say i'm sit on the sidelines because is no opportunity for me but now there is. conservative judges, two members of the 7 court it will serve for a long time, well accomplish thoughtful jurists. and some changes nobody's paying attention to which could help on healthcare by market and competition and choice and look abroad. here is a guy who is supposed to be sort of soft on russia and we have the toughest

sanctions we ever had on russian and russian oligarchs and vladimir putin's buddies. nato, every president worried about how to get our allies to live up to them, and in germany, he can tell you how painful it is to tell the germans you need to do your fair share. i didn't like the way he went about doing it but it had some action and we see our nato allies doing what they need to do which is to step up to the bar and start spending money so they can be part of our common defense in europe and around the world. the iran nuclear deal, pulled out of it, promised he would and did it, moving the embassy to jerusalem and did it. and still maintains close relationships with syria, jordan and saudi arabia and our other allies of the region. syria, when he said within the first couple months of his time

in office, syria once again used gas on their people and some reported this to him does that break the red line with you like it did with president obama and i was watching the news conference and when he said it crosses a lot of lines, here we go again, here we go again, something bad happens and we say it crosses a line and president obama did nothing about it. i happened to meet with one of those infinite number of saudi princes, no idea what number he is, number 578 in the line of succession, well-educated, impeccable english, had a lovely conversation and at the end we got to talking about the state of the world and he says i want to congratulate the united states of america for what you've achieved in the last few years, you've achieved the impossible and i want to congratulate you. what is that exactly? he said you've convinced that the kingdom of saudi arabia and the state of israel that you

are completely unreliable ally. i'm sitting there thinking when i'm watching donald trump answer that question saying here we go again, once again our credibility being sign off and not too many hours later, 198 it was cruise missiles come launching off of american vessels and in a few moments one quarter of the syrian air force is destroyed and you saw those pictures, those little bunkers the size of the stage and inside the russian built fighter and the fighter is gone and the bunker remains, says something about american technology. nafta. i cannot say mca without seeing the village people.

and it was not, it was not a major redo but it was an update. and nafta needed to be updated. when we wrote it in 1990 to the internet and e-commerce was 0 and the mexicans were never going to be willing to allow american investment in the energy industry and financial services was not a big centerpiece of it but we have updated it now. a lot of fanfare and side damage but gotten update and south america finally paying attention to the neighborhood and working in concert with our allies when the administration endorsed the provisional president of venezuela in the last few days, we did it in concert with and after it had been done by the leaders of countries like canada and colombia and chile and argentina and paraguay and brazil and it was the right thing to do but having said that the jury is still out on north korea and china and i have concerns about how we are treating our allies and our friends and the idea withdrawing prematurely from syria and afghanistan but the point is this. he does a lot of things and

some of them conservatives and republicans can applaud and maybe some people who are not republicans and conservatives would applaud if he talked about them and spend less time tweeting about meryl streep's acting ability. but i must admit i am really down on where we are in american politics right now because we have the president made the mistake, do not shut the government down. we have a $4.4 trillion enterprise and saying were going to take one quarter of that off-line and not run it in the proper fashion is an irresponsible thing to do for the leader of the united states of america, great country should not, must not and cannot do that kind of thing so that was a mistake. but then we get embroiled in an unnecessary controversy over something that ought to be done. i'm the biggest advocate of comprehensive immigration reform. i was there in the white house for three years bleeding over the issue in 2005-6-7 as we worked with mccain and kennedy to pass a comprehensive immigration reform law so i

don't need to prove being in favor of immigration but there are parts along the southern dubbadash-city of time during the campaign mocking donald trump for suggesting we needed a big beautiful wall along 1954 miles of the us-mexico border because we don't. in texas we got the santa catalina canyon, 150 miles in the big bend of texas, the us borders 1100 feet up in the air. it is a canyon. the mexican border 750 feet in the air. where are you going to put the wall? you want to keep that one mexican from climbing down 750 feet, go across the river and climbing up 1100 feet and then saying i got another 30 feet to get up. i was rewarded for this intemperance set of remarks put into my:wall street journal by having the future nominee of the republican party stand up for 20 minutes in dallas, texas and spend 20 minutes ripping my sorry ass.

i'm sure a lot of people said who is this north korean karl rove? what is the matter with this guy? the president is right. one, harris says the wall is immoral, prove it to me, introduce the bill that hells between mexico and the united states, tell all those people you don't want a wall that keeps people walking in a neighborhood in mexico across the street into the united states and instead forces them to go to a border crossing. please do that. when you do that you will shoot straight with me then rather than playing stupid politics. the amount of money the president wanted was $5.7 million, that is one 10th

of 1% of the federal budget and we are going to shut down the government rather than getting a room and say it's not going to be $5.7 billion, it's going to be $3.7 billion and we know you will scrape together $900 million more by recasting money inside the department of homeland security been in return we want an answer to the problem of the dreamers or tsp or both. this is how it is supposed to work. but it is broken and it is broken because we don't have adults in both parties. i know nancy pelosi wanted to show that she was in charge and strong but she did a disservice to our country. we've got 1.5 million people sitting out there saying i was brought to the united states as a child, i know no country except the united states of

america and my status is up in the air and because you want to show that you were strong and could defeat donald trump in a political battle my status is still unknown. i'm one of several hundred thousand people granted temporary protective status because i came from a country that suffered a horrible natural disaster or i'm the victim of an internal conflict like in south sudan that is almost beyond human understanding, y gmy family an up in the air and because you wanted to look strong my status is still questions. the president shouldn't have gotten us in the shutdown but everybody has a responsibility to resolve this problem in a way that makes sense for the future of our country. now, strong message to follow. not that anybody is listening but now we are facing 2020 and that's what this is all about, this is about pre-positioning for 2020. i wish we could find a way to say we are going to penalize people who spend time on politics the year before the election instead of the year the election itself.

maybe we are because in the shutdown nancy pelosi's negative classroom faster and further than donald trump's did. maybe there was some good common sense in american people saying okay, nancy, seriously, i'm a democrat, but get it done. now we are facing 2020 and jamie talked about 2020, like i've got the little thing here and i am johnny carson, holding the thing up. who the heck knows what's going to happen? i can tell you this. the president jobs approval today is 41 approve, 55.5 disapprove. on the approval side his entire time in office he has floated between 37, and 44. approval. that is a very narrow range. 's disapproval is also narrow, 52-58. what that means is people are dug in about him. quinnipiac, january 11th. 33 strongly favorable, 50

strongly unfavorable. fox, 12-11, 27 strongly favorable, 42 strongly unfavorable so not only are the president's numbers wrong but the intensity is on the other side. is reelected 38 in fox, someone else 47. actually it is 55 someone else, 47 strongly someone else, 7% likely someone else but i remind you of this. nothing is locked in stone. at this point in 2010 barack obama's reelects was 43. how did he get reelected? he did three things, a little bit of new policy, dac a in summer of 2012, talked about what he had done a little bit more, spent most of his efforts disqualifying mitt romney and

my suspicion is we are likely to see team trump do a little bit of new policy, maybe talk a little more about what they have done, spent most of its i'm trying to qualify whoever the democratic nominee, we will have a positive, optimistic and uplifting campaign. but the president starts out somewhere between that, somewhere between that 38 reelected and 44% approval he has been able to get at some point, he is storming out of the starting gate and that is where he is. where the democrats, i don't think they are 55% voting for someone else because at the end of the day they will say wait a minute, that person, no. i would rather have the one i've got than that one. but democrats do start out ahead. because i think the base is the 43% of the american electorate that says i want to impeach the guy and the starting point is somewhere between that number and 50% who say i strongly disapprove of him so they have an easier game getting across the finish line than he does but they could overplay their hand. we saw it in brett kavanaugh.

i was in american crossroads a super pac that raise $195 million. if any of you got your checkbooks with me, american crossroads, write out a big check. i could see it in the polls after brett kavanaugh. it was a reaction to the unfairness of it because a lot of people to say i am going to come onto the field and vote for the republican candidate for senate. they were much stronger or into good territory. both parties are screwed up, not only structurally but are intent upon appealing to the base. they seem base is there particularly in this environment in the real election targets are the people who link to their choice or up for grabs, looking desperately for something better.

the republicans may have a primary, if donald trump runs he will win because people will flock to him. if i were sitting in the west wing i would be nervous about recent polls, the president's job approval is in the mid to high 80s we got into a point where a third of republicans don't want him to run again. i see this as i travel. i love what the president is done on x. how do you feel about this tweet? i wish you would stop doing that and that will have a corrosive attacked policy changes how he is handling himself. on the other hand the democrats. we thought we were in trouble when we had 17. they could have 20. not only that but politics is fundamentally changing so there will be a bunch of things to think about and watch in the next year. don't pay attention to national polls. all they are is whose name has

been out that week. harris is up because she announced. someone else will zoom up when they announce. or we already know you. without going out on the campaign trail, joe biden will be at the top of the democratic heap for the rest of the year because we all know old joe. and democrats begin debates in june. by june everybody who wants to be considered a candidate will get the free publicity of the debate. how do you get 20 people on a stage. good luck with that. i am looking forward to it. people say things in such a way to grab people's attention. how that plays out is interesting. if you are running for president, when i was running the campaign in 2000-2004 we

were worried about abc, cbs, nbc, fox, and ms nbc. how do you get on that channel? how do you have an image, and in the news. think about it now. and your instagram account and facebook page and youtube channel your twitter feed, all of those people you get to talk to whenever you want to talk to. why do you think robert francis o'rourke's nickname he refuses to say has been going around the countryside? he knows if he gets his teeth cleaned a bunch of lunatics numbering in the hundreds of thousands if not millions will watch him on his social media feed. he has a direct channel to talk to them. normally we go through a

process where they can't raise enough money to keep enough interest or keep enough enthusiasm and lag in the polls, what if you can inexpensively communicate with a vast number of people you have collected and energized anytime you want to with something interesting? we have candidates who stay in the race a lot longer, 100,000 people loyal enough to send 10 or $15 a month and given of juice to stay in the contest. a states. iowa comes along, we are going into iowa, and then comes the upset in iowa by barack obama, doesn't guarantee a win in new hampshire a week later and vaults into the top of the polls. will we see this not when we have 3 or 4 candidates and 15

or 20. march 3rd used to be a ho-hum debate in the primary process. california and texas, what happens on march 3rd and in new hampshire, they broke through south carolina. what if they are not from texas or california and march 3rd comes down in somebody, does that stop the momentum in those earlier states? democratic rules are more proportional than republicans. if you are in texas, 3% of the vote, and highly proportional rules and big contests early,

we have candidates, vote out of florida and california and aren't anywhere else, this is the first democratic convention since 1952 that does to mui-ballots at the convention because proportion rules, some of these candidates have 20 or 30 delegates or 40 or 50 delegates or 100 or 200 delegates and nobody has a majority in the first ballot, and there are a number of ballots. finally, my favorite thing is democratic party is the only political party i know of that has its own house of lords. we call them the superdelegates. they said this time around we will crimp their authority. they don't get to vote on the first ballot. so what happens if it is a multi-ballot convention and on the second ballot suddenly on the horizon appears 700 grandys

made superdelegates when they attended the 1840 convention that nominated james k polk, or they were a campaign advisor to the reelection campaign or advanced man for john kennedy in 1960 and became a superdelegate then? these people have been around for decades and what happens on the second ballot when 700 of them come screaming into a multiballot democratic convention? this could be nirvana for every political junkie in america. they will go to the general election. it will be a heckuva contest because it will come down to a smaller number of battleground states. and timken received his vision, and you can bet every town and county in wisconsin and pennsylvania is covered up by candidates. democrats going after iowa and

arizona, the republicans are retaliating by going after new hampshire, nevada, minnesota, maine and colorado and it is difficult for the 45th president and unless and until democrats nominate somebody on the far left of american politics because the danger for the democrats is they could nominate somebody like that. you may have seen this piece in the wall street journal on the op-ed page, insightful, well written, concise, full of a lot of information. i did a helluva job with it myself. medicare for all, and support drops to 44% if you start calling it socialized medicine, drops to 37% if you say your taxes are going to go up and you lose your private insurance coverage.

a lot of things that sound good like free college or guaranteed job for universal basic income sound good to the democratic base but not going to be good long-term. let me quickly say. i've wasted too much time. none of this is as important as what we are missing a conversation about in america today and that is three big challenges. one is entitlements come medicare is going to go belly up in 2026, the hospital trust fund runs out of money. the problem is the average american working couple by 65 will pay $160,000 in medicare taxes and over the course of their lifetime take out an average of $468,000 in benefits and past $326,000 to our kids and grandkids. that is simply unsustainable. social security actuary say the

drug trust fund will run out in 2034. at least when they pass that in the 1930s, when the trust fund goes up, benefits must be cut overnight to match the income stream which means everybody on social security gets 24%. everybody in this room can probably get by but there are a lot of people, social security is their only source of income and having their income cut 25% is not going to cut it. the only way to solve it, if we acted today and said we will solve it by keeping the current system in place we would have to do one of two things, either raise payroll taxes 25% effective today or we would have to cut the benefit for everybody 21% in order to keep it from going out of business. we have a problem. there is an answer for it. the answer is to be found in solution advocated by daniel patrick moynihan, the reform

commission that reported in 2000 for the called progressive indexing that said we will keep the promise to everybody at the bottom of the scale we made. if you are warren buffett you will get a social security check and purchasing power only as good as it is today because one of the dirty little secrets is the way formulate social security benefits using a concept called accelerated wages, you may think of the average benefit today was $13,000 and you retired in 2050 you get $13,000 adjusted for inflation you get $22,000 in today's dollars in 2050 because of the way we calculate the benefits. we are giving you inflation plus. then we got the problem of deficits and debt. january 20, 2009, the public debt of the united states securitized in the form a bond was equal to 40% gdp, this

morning 78% of gdp federal gov spending is equal to 20 points and of gdp. it has averaged 23% of gdp. already we are half a point above average for the last 50 years. by the end of the decade it will be 20% of gdp. revenues are equal to 16.5% of gdp, 50 year average is 17.4 but because of the text that they are below. by the end of the decade they will be at 18.3% of gdp so they will be above average and we will have a deficit of 4.7% of

gdp. we have terrain and spending, grow the economy faster and we can't do it by simply raining and spending on the discretionary side of the budget which is less then a third of the budget and growing smaller every year. we have to have structural reform of mandatory programs and that is politically difficult and dangerous when both parties seem intent on exacting political revenge on their opponents. then we heard this. china, russia and islamic fundamentalism, these challenges, some are relatively recent, some are very old but all of them are new in their methods and goals. we ought to be talking about these things rather -- we need to resolve the issue of $5.7 billion for a barrier on the southern border. let me take a few moments to answer questions. sorry to have prattle on so long.

on the situation -- we are a 2-party system, more power to them but it is hard to get on 50 state ballot and ross perot had 19% of the vote, 0 in the electoral college but i'm glad he's in there because he may force both parties to realize the people they are competing for are exactly the people who say i am not that far out on that side, not that far out on that side but i want the system to work. >> why do you think the intelligence service -- >> why they think the intelligence service said iran is not an issue? they didn't say that. what they said is very narrowly targeted which was the iranian's are continuing to comply with the iranian nuclear deal, and not developing beyond current capability and that is

for two reasons. they know there is a clock on that and eventually they can reinstate to the weapons program but more importantly they are an economic disaster and they need european investment and chinese investment and consumer goods and the way to do that is comply with the agreement and rebuild their economy. at the end it's the economy, stupid. carville was right on one thing and if they chance of a primar? 21/2 years ago you were saying he is a terrifying moron and now saying i don't like him much but he has accomplished a lot.

>> is there a chance of a real challenge to trump? and i said he was a moron two years ago which i did say and now i'm sucking up to him. i'm calling balls and strikes. the answer to the first one is yes, if the mueller report has something more damaging than i think it is going to have, yes. is there a crisis that happens and he mishandled it? yes. by steady application people's concerns, that third that says we don't want him to run, yes. but today i don't see the person, i don't see those conditions coming to pass but i was wrong about him being able to get elected. he could get reelected or not get reelected and both of us would be wrong. >> how do you feel about the unicef survey, 41 industrialized countries in the

world and the united states came in 37th out of 41 in many more. >> i'm not familiar with the survey but i have a very bad allergic reaction to anything the united nations issues in the way of a formal declaration a report on the status of the world. when the human rights commission of the united nations is chaired by representatives of not just authoritarian regimes but totalitarian regimes i would rather be judged by somebody other than the united nations. sorry to be so blunt. anything else? i will close by exercising speaker's prerogative and ending on an optimistic note. >> do you think trump will shut down the government? >> my answer is no. i think he will be forced, there will be a bill out of the committee that he will sign and

claim partial victory and he out to claim partial victory but i don't. in the white house political shop they recognize too much of a bad thing. even they understand it was a bad thing. >> the republican party not get together like democrats are? >> why don't republicans get together like democrats? you've been watching the democrats too closely. they are controlling it right now because it is easier to say no than to say yes but we are broken. and it is ridiculous. as much as we recognize that, they have been this way before and we are not as bad as we have been before in many respects. everybody in this room members 1968-69-70-71-72-73. our country looked like it was

coming apart at the seams. i am writing a new book for simon & schuster on presidential decision-making, looking at 6 big consequential decisions and what did that president know at that time and the election of 1800 thomas jefferson must have been the author of the declaration of independence, the university of virginia, secretary of state, vice president of the united states, one of the great figures of our country. he must've been enormously popular. the election of 1800 and the electoral college, on december 3rd, you voted for the president and vice president separately.actually you voted, president was the second guy, whoever came in number 2. if you were jefferson you would expect some of your electors would throw away their vote on the vice president and vote for

somebody else. in this case aaron burr. you think some guys from georgia will take care of this problem but they don't. aaron burr knowing how close the election was think the have a chance to snake it. it is an electoral tie between thomas jefferson and his running mate and third places john adams and in fourth place is adams's running mate. 31 days from hell in 2000, how our country was riven over that. congress meets in the middle of february 18, '01, the house of representatives has to decide the election, they meet in the midst of a blinding snowstorm. each state has one vote. maryland has four democratic republicans and four federalists and one of the democratic republicans is ill and fails to shop, maryland will go for burr who is the semi-official candidate of the federalists. he insists on being carried in

a pallet through a blinding snowstorm for 2 miles in washington dc and is stalled in a committee room next to the house for so he can vote. they vote starting at noon and cast nearly 30 ballots by noon the next morning, straight through the night, every vote is the same, inconclusive. they talk about it and work over the next 6 or 7 days and alexander hamilton ways in and says i hate jefferson but i also hate burr. jefferson at least has some character. he tells baer of delaware given a choice between two evils go for the lesser every time. so baird makes himself absent by basically canceling delaware's vote and convinces a colleague from vermont that the democratic congressman from vermont can cast a ballot for jefferson and jefferson is elected president of the united

states after 37 ballot and ten days of debate and is sworn in and two weeks later. go to the gilded age which i studied for that brilliant book the triumph of william mckinley and you think politics today is broken? during the debate in 1884 editor of measure that fails one member of the democratic party stands up and excoriates a fellow democrat in such personal terms the offended member says mister speaker, the member is violating the core of the house and the speaker says the honorable gentleman from georgia is out of order and turns to his colleague and said i will not blank you if you are a dog, four letters. we have appear go in 1889 through 1890 in which not a single bill is passed in the house of representatives for nearly 41/2 months because the demoats announce they will not answer the rollcall and

thereby deny the house a quorum so no business could be conducted. it is not we will shut down the government to is your bill obamacare, it is we don't care what you're going to do, nothing will pass because we won't answer the rollcall. you may have heard me tell the , speaker of the house, plans on one particular day to end this has sergeant at arm lock arms in front of a door and unbeknownst to members of the house of representatives has barricaded a door of the house floor on the outside. at the end of the vote someone calls a quorum call, they call a quorum, democrats don't answer, quorum does not exist and the chair directs the clerk to show mister jones present, mister smith present, calls the name of every democrat on the floor of the house and director clark to show them present at what happens? all hell breaks loose, they run for the doors. the sergeant-at-arms have locked arms. only one member of the house gets out, constantine august of rest county, beats the crap out of the sergeant of arms and uses his cowboy boots to kick out the door and make his escape. when democrats stand up and

screams in anger at reed saying under god and the constitution you have no right to count me president without my permission and re says the chair is merely stating a fact that the honorable gentleman from kentucky deny he is present on the floor of the house? for 21/2 months this has wrangled upon in the house and settles by the us supreme court. in the meantime for 4 to half months no bill gets passed. opening day of the debate another texan makes a contribution to the positive spirit of the times, william henry martin, 6 inches tall mean as a snake, follow the entire civil war with hoods brigade and pointed finger at reed and if any member will order me to remove this dictator from this position of power up on the podium, and read says the honorable exit -- gentleman from texas is out of order, the next day he shows

up, 16 inch long boeing i've, sits in front of the speaker of the house and without a sharpens it on his boot sold in order to menace the speaker. i don't remember nancy pelosi doing this in 2011. we have been here before, we will get out of it again, thank you. [applause] .. also the san antonio book festival. merlin takes a look at conspiracy theorists. hector garcia explores the