john avalon joining us for tonight's reality check. trend here in recent years. >> this is really the structural dynamic that leads to the insanity we're seeing. bottom line, the incentive structure in the politics is all screwed up. it moves power to the extremes. take a look at this. the number of competitive congressional districts, you know, where the general election actually mattered where the candidates had to compete for votes in the middle, those have been cut in more than half since 1997 by design through the rigged system of redistricting and it's likely to get much worse so that forces the politicians further to the extremes and guess what? that translates to how they vote in congress. you see a polarization both parties playing to the respective bases. there is almost no over lap now between what used to be a hand full of progressive republicans and conservative democrats and you can find a constructive compromise. that's gone out the window. and if you look closely, it's important to say this is a s symmetric polarization

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a reality check on what this maybes, john avalon joining us tonight. scheme that he was reportedly concocting. >> it's just another layer of disgrace in the eyes of history that he has brought upon himself for trying to overturn our democracy. and what makes it tragic from my perspective is that it really shows the decline of a man i knew and worked with and who is one of the most respected lawyers of his generation. you know, one of the youngest deputy attorney generals in our history, u.s. attorney, mayor of new york and to see someone who had such respect for the law beclown himself consistently in this way for membership to a cult, to try to overturn an election desperately consistently in coordination is a hideous thing to watch and all the good things that he did in his career i'm afraid will be overshadowed by this because there is nothing bigger or more basic than trying to overturn an election in our democracy and that is what he did. that is what he tried to do. >> beclown himself. that is such a good verb for what he's chanctransformed into.

let's bring in john avalon and kim, a professor at the baltimore school of law.ening to both of your smiling faces this evening. so good to have you on. the former vice president mike pence is increasingly less likely to voluntarily cooperate. he's told aides he's annoyed the committee is publicly signaling cooperation from aides than he's gotten. sounds like a convenient excuse but what do you think? how crucial is his testimony and i don't think it's a surprise he's questioning it. >> it is crucial. this is an inquiry that should be taking place on a plane far above partisan politics and the presence of liz cheney and adam kinzinger on the committee indicates that. mike pence is a man of faith and should remember the truth will set you free. this is basic. he's just got to go and tell the truth. this is a mob that wanted to hang him. this is a president that's not going to reward belated loyalty because he's thrown him to the mob. this is about american history. this is about preserving democracy and doing the right thing and telling the truth is the surest way

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politics -- not the physical violence, of course, but when it comes to our politics a year later, as john avalon said, just looking at history, understanding how america general reacts and reacts to major traumas that unfold on our soil, it's usually a uniting experience. and that unity was fleeting. it lasted for minutes inside the capitol and around the country until the conspiracies and the lies took hold once again. >> congressman dent, earlier on the program we had senator dick durbin and olivia troy. both of them have spoken about how they're more worried today than they were a year ago about the state of democracy. we saw it was a national stress test a year ago, but there were a few guardrails that held. now since then, we've seen everything that's happening on the local level with election officials being replaced by trump cronies. where are you a year later? >> well, i think we should celebrate something for a moment, the fact that our institutions did hold, that election officials around the country like brad raffensperger and other elected officials in states like pennsylvania did th

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with us now, cnn senior political analyst john avalon, gloria borger and olivia troye, she was an advisoro mike pence when he was the vice president. olivia, i want to start with you because in those moments, we saw, i think, for the first time in many of our lives, how fragile democracy was. we had taken it for granted and we saw how quickly the guardrails had come down and we might have lost it that day had a few guardrails not held and i'm wondering a year later if you think that we're in any better position today. >> no, unfortunately, i think we're actually in a worse position, because while i had hoped and wanted to believe that the events, the narratives that led us down the path to the january 6th event and the tragic moment would cease and that would be a moment of reckoning, especially within the republican party. the damage that was being done and what was happening here across our country. and we saw this and lived this firsthand, watching these horrific images that we're watching again today. but i think those narrative and that messaging has continued and in fact, they've do