In The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Oxford University Press, 2006), authors Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann suggest that over the past fifteen years, Congress has seen the collapse of the deliberative process, the erosion of the regular order, and a corresponding decline in the quality of legislation passed. The authors believe that the state of today’s Congress is worse than it has been in the more than three decades each of them has spent immersed in the dynamics of Congress.

Two former Speakers of the House, Thomas Foley (D-Wash.) and Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), will join Ornstein and Mann to discuss the state of Congress today, how we got here, and what it means for governance in the future.