Lee H. Hamilton

 One of the more amazing spectacles in the days after the government shutdown ended was the obsession in Washington with who won and who lost in the showdown. Yes, the capital is focused on next year’s elections, but honestly! There was only one real loser, and that was the American people. Why? Because nothing got […]

 The American public has lost patience with Washington. The question is, now what? Congress is unable to do its job. It displays neither competence nor responsibility. It lurches – reeling from crisis to crisis, each one self-manufactured in an effort to postpone the reckoning from some earlier crisis. It shut the government down over a […]

Deeply unpopular and flagrantly unproductive, Congress is on its August recess right now. It won’t return until Sept. 9, after a five-week recess, leaving itself just a few days to settle issues like raising the debt ceiling and passing a federal budget. Here are some things you should know about where it stands at this […]

With the formal release of President Obama’s budget, the pieces are finally in place for a reprise of the Washington drama we’ve all come to know. There will be high-stakes negotiations, lines in the sand, and enough intrigue to keep Beltway insiders riveted by every piece of breaking news. The rest of us, though, are […]

We are locked in a seemingly permanent debate over the proper size and scope of government. It was a centerpiece of the recent presidential campaign. It featured heavily in the maneuvering over the “fiscal cliff” and the upcoming vote on raising the debt ceiling. And it surfaces regularly in the speeches and comments of politicians […]

The election of 2012 has called attention to how difficult it is for Americans to talk reasonably with one another about public policy challenges. Our civic dialogue – how we sort through issues and reason with one another – is too often lamentable. We live in a politically divided country. Congress, which ought to serve […]

There are lots of ways in which members of Congress differ from the American people. They are wealthier, whiter and older. Proportionally more of them are men, and far more are lawyers. All of these differences can affect congressional deliberations, but none matches another gap that has opened up: Congress, unlike the country at large, […]

The Gulf oil spill has laid bare a series of shortcomings in the government’s ability both to prevent and to respond to such a crisis, and the result is spiraling public frustration. But it might not hurt for members of the public to save a little of that frustration for themselves.Because anyone trying to figure […]