Mad House Mess | Journeyman Pictures

Film: Mad House Mess

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Transcript

Madhouse Mess: How Washington stopped working

Script

12 October 2013

Who	Script	Visual/Graphics
Open Narrator Narrator Vox Pops Narrator Pres. Obama (D) Speaker John Boehner (R) Senate Majority Leader: Harry Reid (D) Fmr. Senator Alan Simpson (R) Narrator Narrator Fmr Senator Alan Specter (Republican 1980-2009: Democrat 2009-2010) Narrator Vox Pops Narrator Obama Narrator Obama Narrator Narrator: Narrator: Vox Pops: Man with Mo. Man with beard. Narrator Grover Norquist Grover Norquist Narrator Reagan	VO: On the first of October 2013, the Federal Government of the United States of America was shut down for the first time in eighteen years. UPSOT (Rep. Marcy Kaptur. D): Mr Speaker, we cannot continue to govern by staggering from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis. The madness must stop. UPSOT (Boehner. R): This law is a train wreck and it is a train wreck. UPSOT (Schumer. D): We won't be extorted now. We won't be extorted two weeks from now; we won't be extorted in December. Mr Boehner; pass our bill. V/O: Around a million government employees were sent home without pay, federal programs and services ground to a halt, National Parks and monuments were closed... the stock market fell and America faced the possibility of an economic recession made in Washington... UPSOT: Woman - It's pretty rough, I mean people are not going to get paid. Man - My wife and I just bought a new house, and I'd hate to lose it. So if this goes on for a period we might be in jeopardy. Man - A lot of my neighbours are in the same situation, so we're all in the same boat and we really have no idea what's going to happen next. V/O: The Obama years have seen one political crisis after another as America struggled to recover from the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression. MONTAGE The battle over the budget and the nation's level of debt followed: - the fiscal cliff, - the debt ceiling, - the sequester; and - annual fights in Congress over the budget. UPSOT (Pres. Obama, D): The only thing that is keeping the government shutdown, the only thing preventing people going back to work and basic research starting back p and farmers and small business owners getting their loans. The only thing that's preventing that from happening right now, today, in the next five minutes, is because Speaker John Boehner doesn't even want to let the Bill get a yes or no vote. Because he doesn't want to anger the extremists in his own party. UPSOT (Boehner, R): This law is not ready for prime time. The House has done its work. UPSOT (Reid, D) As we said Friday, nothing has changed. If they try to send us something back they are spinning wheels. We are not going to change Obamacare. Senator Alan Simpson "You've got 82 new people in Congress who didn't come to limit government, they came to stop it" V/O: It has been the most bitterly partisan and least productive period in American political history. Specter: There is a general feeling that the United States Government is broken, that the gridlock is intolerable and that Washington is a madhouse mess. V/O: So, how did Washington become so dysfunctional? How did the world's largest economy and self-proclaimed ‘beacon of democracy' reach a point of political gridlock? Man: It's ridiculous. This is ridiculous. We gotta find a way to work this thing out. I mean people's lives depend on this. I think it's nuts they can't come to some conclusion and decision on this at all. Man: I'm thoroughly disgusted with our politicians. As I see it right bow they're acting like a bunch of three-year old children. It's who can hold their breath the longest. V/O: It's all a long way from the day in November 2008 when the election of Barack Obama saw a wave of hope spread across America and around the world. CELEBRATIONS Upsot (Obama): If there is anyway out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible V/O: The nation built on slavery had elected its first black President. That night in Chicago, Barack Obama echoed the words of another America President, Abraham Lincoln... UPSOT Obama: A government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from the earth. V/O: While Lincoln's election in 1860 triggered the American Civil War ... Obama's election triggered a political battle that has had far-reaching consequences. FIGHTING V/O: This is the story of how the Republican Party went to war with itself. Fighting V/O: These people have come from all over America to recreate a victory for the southern Confederacy who wanted to leave the US to preserve slavery. V/O: This is Wilson's Creek in the mid western state of Missouri, 150 years to the day since a famous battle was fought on what came to be known as bloody hill... We're not fighting the civil war again, we're trying to teach history, keep the interest in history alive and we enjoy, quite honestly, I'm in artillery, we enjoy exploding large amounts of black powered in a safe manner. I think we're really just fighting some of the same battles again, the time of this war, the time of a centralized government, we're talking about a government making decisions that certain sections of the population don't agree with and isn't that where we are today with American politics? Where will our government go, what direction will it take - will it be free spending or will it be economically conservative or will it be socially conservative? V/O: There are plenty of fundamental questions facing Americans today... and one man who thinks he has the answers is anti-tax Republican, Grover Norquist... GN: The Republican Party for 100 years was the party of Lincoln - that's what defined being a republican, it meant being from the north, and people from your state were against slavery and against secession, well you know what, after 100 years even most democrats are against slavery and against secession so it doesn't distinguish republicans from democrats from a republican, most democrats are against slavery and against secession so a Lincoln republican doesn't have any meaning any more - a Reagan Republican defines a modern republican - limited government, maximizing liberty, limiting taxes and spending and control over your life, strong defense, strong enough to keep other countries from attacking you - not running an empire but having national self defense - that's the modern republican - Reagan and his policies and his writings and his speeches is the model for the next 100 years. V/O But while Reagan is a hero to Republicans, a fierce debate is underway about what Reagan actually stood for... UPSOT (Reagan): That we will uphold the principles of self reliance, self discipline, morality and above all responsible liberty for every individual. UPSOT (Santelli et al): President Obama! Are you listening?! Interjection: How about we all stop paying our mortgage - it's a moral hazard. We're thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July; all you capitalists who want to show up to Lake Michigan, I'm gonna start organizing!	Ext: Capitol building Int : Capitol building Congresswoman Speaker Narrator Boenher (R) Senator Chuck Schumer Bring up music ‘Incidental cue 7' and fade under V/O Shutdown footage/protest US recession. MUSIC STING and fade under and out ‘Incidental Music cue 7' Washington/Congress/ WhiteHouse Obama - lectern House Press conference Interview MUSIC STING Incidental Music cue 7... Interview ...Music finishes of its own accord. Chicago 2008 ‘Obama wins' celebrations. Street celebrating Obama Grant park victory speech... Obama - Grant Park Lincoln/civil war overlay Overlay - fighting Wilson's Creek Video: Battle sequence from Wilson's Creek. Interview Historical footage: Reagan Reagan TV ad. CNBC Reporter: Rick Santelli
Narrator James Fallows	V/O: The anti-tax movement has gained strength in recent years thanks to the arrival of the Tea Party movement - the TEA stands for Taxed Enough Already and harks back to the revolutionary anti-tax protest known as the Boston Tea Party when British tea was dumped in the harbor. JF: The Tea Party Movement simultaneously added fervor and energy to the Republican side while pushing it to the extreme, I think that Mitt Romney in the 2012 general election had a much harder path to follow against Barack Obama than he would have if he hadn't had all of this Tea Party pressure during the primaries that he had to accommodate	TEA PARTY Protests Interview
Narrator Matt Kibbe Matt Kibbe	Narrator V/O: Matt Kibbe is one of the most prominent Tea partiers, he's with a group called Freedomworks which finances conservative Republican candidates... he says the Tea Party began in opposition to emergency government spending as the global financial crisis hit... MK: We trace it to the wall street bailout, and particularly when George W Bush said I'm abandoning free market principles to save the free market. Every Tea partier I know again and again and again will quote that verbatim and cite that as the moment they realized they needed to show up and fight against a government that had gotten too big, perhaps gotten too close to Wall Street and too in bed with special interests inside the DC beltway...	Establishment shot Matt Kibbe - Interview. Tea Party protests Interview
Dan Schnur Matt Kibbe	These are people who watched federal spending increase under the previous Republican administration and they're suspicious of political leaders on both sides.. MK: Go back to Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan said that government was the problem not the solution ... Republicans win when they stand for something that's an alternative to the big government progressivism represented by this President.	Schnur interview (from old page 16)
Dan Schnur (John McCain Advisor, Republican)	Schnur: The Republican Party has always been very much of a three-legged stool. Economic conservatives on one leg, foreign policy and national security conservatives on the second, and social and cultural conservatives on the third. Now up until 2008-2009, the social conservatives had been gaining in influence. If anything what this recession has done is revitalized the economic conservative wing of the party. So the grassroots conservatives you see coming out of the Tea Party movement; they are loud, they are aggressive, they are much less willing to compromise than you're traditional economic conservative; a traditional establishment conservative.
Narrator Vox Pops Ronald Reagan Sean Hannity	V/O: In 2012, the Party settled on Mitt Romney to take on Barack Obama. But it seemed all Republicans were looking for someone they couldn't have, the candidate who last stood for office in 1984... the candidate who had been dead for eight years... Woman: Ronald Reagan (why?) conservative, wasn't afraid to cut taxes, wasn't afraid to cut the freebies to the people who just thought they deserved ‘em. Man: He was an Iowa boy and matter of a fact my grandparents knew him and so he was just a good straightforward honest man. Man: He was my first real exposure to politics, I saw him take us through several crises and just always thought of him as a great figure. Man: Reagan was a pretty good one. UPSOT ( REAGAN): I accept your nomination for the Presidency of United States. SH: He had every quality of a great leader, strong principles, a good vision, the ability to rally the country, terrific communication skills - remember this is before the internet, this is before Fox, this is before Fox, or talk radio, this is before Rush Limbaugh, you know and he had the ability to go to the nation and say ‘we can do better'.	Republican Party straw Poll, Iowa GOP candidates group shot on stage. Exterior Historical footage Interior
Tim Pawlenty Rick Santorum Newt Gingrich Michelle Bachmann Ed Meese Reagan Gary Bauer Ron Reagan Jr. Narrator Ed Meese Roger Porter Ed Meese Roger Porter.	TP: Thirty years ago this very day, August 13^th, Ronald Reagan one of the greatest Presidents in the history of our country signed the economic recovery act into law... RS: Margaret Thatcher when she left the prime ministership of England sais she was never able to accomplish what Ronald Reagan was able to accomplish, never able to turn the tides of socialism and that's what we're talking about here...never able to turn it back in Britain like Reagan was, what Reagan did... NG: If you take the Reagan recovery and apply it to the current population you would add 25 million jobs, in seven years.... MB: And together we are going to make Barack Obama a one-term-president. EM: I think the candidates would all like to be compared favorably with Ronald Reagan and they want to convince the people they follow in the footsteps of Reagan both from the standpoint of philosophy and leadership. Reagan: The people have not created this disaster in our economy; the federal government has. It has overspebt, overestimated and over-regulated. GB: And I think it's interesting that in this last cycle, and quite frankly most every election cycle since Ronald Reagan left the scene, every Republican vying for the nomination tries to convince the electorate that they are the true heir to the Reagan mantle. Montage of candidates saying "Reagan" RRjr: Everything was Reagan, Reagan, Reagan, I'm Reagan, I'm the next Reagan - but none of them are... V/O But the worshiping of Ronald Reagan is more than just nostalgia... Reagan may be gone, but he's at the heart of a conflict over the role of government in people's lives ... EM: He was the leading proponent of conservative principles; free market economics, individual liberty, strong national defence, traditional American values and limited government. RP: He had a deep set of principles. That he believed in very fervently that he was reluctant to abandon or compromise. At the same time he had a remarkable capacity to understand the give and take of politics and how one needs to accommodate large numbers of interests, and viewpoints and perspectives. EM: Ronald Reagan always stood for principle. He never compromised his principles but he would sometimes compromise on issues to get to his objectives to get to his objectives. As he used to say ‘I'll take half a loaf from Congress if that's all I can get and then once I've got that, I'll go back and try and get the rest. RP: I remember him saying, ‘Let's see if I've got this right. We've got 80% of what we want. I don't know about you fellas' - and it was always fellas even when there were women in the room, ‘I don't know about you fellas but I think that's pretty good.' And there were always people who were thumping their chest saying we had to go back to the negotiating table and he would come in an disarm the situation by basically saying ‘I think we've got as much as we're going to get' and ‘Let's declare victory'.	Tim Pawlenty at Ames. Historical footage: Overlay Thatcher's visit to US Campaign event Straw Poll Interview Reagan campaign ad Interview Overlay: Reagan campaigning TV montage of 2012 GOP candidates saying "Reagan". Interview Reagan looking affable; waving to cheering crowds Interview Interview Interview Overalay: Reagan and Tip O'Neill Stills overlay - Reagan in meetings
Narrator V/O Ted Cruz (R) Alan Simpson (R) Jim McDermott (D) Narrator Representative Jon Kyl (Republic Senate Minority Whip) Narrator James Fallows	V/O: But if Ronald Reagan was happy with an 80% compromise to reach an agreement, the same can't be said of Republicans in Washington these days. UPSOT (Cruz, R): The debt ceiling historically has been the best leverage that Congress has to rein-in the Executive. Simpson: A zealot is someone who having forgotten his purpose, redoubles his efforts. Zealots are 100-per-centers. Show me a hundered-per-center - no matter what they're talking about - and I'll show you someone I want to stay away from., UPSOT (McDermott, D): They gotta have that check in the box that says I voted against Obama care (interjection). Vote No! V/O ...virtually no Republican members of the House or Senate have been prepared to work with President Obama ... in fact they have done everything they can to stop him, including shutting down the government. UPSOT (Kyl, R): Mr Chairman, it's courteous if you don't interrupt someone in the middle of a sentence, right in the middle of an important point they're trying to make. I have not dominated this discussion; I have not filibustered in this market we've been having. V/O: The 2013 shutdown was a last-ditch attempt - led by Tea-Party Republicans - to stop or delay Barack Obama's health care reforms. Ironically, Obama's reforms were based on a Republican plan put into effect by his former Presidential rival, Mitt Romney. Fallows: The merits of this plan - they are all Republican in their origin. Again, the idea of this as an alternative to real universal health care system - that had been a Republican Party plan since the 1990s and onwards... Mitt Romney as a Republican had happily introduced the plan in Massachusetts. But simply because of partisan opposition to the Obama administration putting this through, it became a life or death, party-line, absolute vote and passed by the barest of margins, it became a rallying cry - we're going to stop Obamacare and stop Obama himself.	Capitol Building exterior, maybe interior of senate or house from C-span. Ted Cruz - TV interview Interview, Simpson Congress
Narrator Simpson (R)	V/O: While Republicans command a majority in the House of Representatives, Democrats have the numbers in the Senate - but a tactic called the filibuster allows the minority party to stop bills they don't like ever going to a vote... unless the majority part can muster 60 votes... Simpson: Well the filibuster is like an automatic butt-kicking machine: It goes around with a boot on it and sometimes it will be very helpful to you and sometimes it will be harmful to you but they're not going to change it. But there's a way to handle the filibuster and it's three words: Bring. A. Cot.	Ext. Capitol building Int. Capitol building Interview
James fallows Alan Simpson Senator Mitch McConnell Sen. Arlen Specter Alan Simpson Bruce Bartlett Narrator Mike Lofgren Bartlett Narrator Specter Specter Specter protester Narrator Vice President Joe Biden (Democrat) James Fallows Ron Reagan Jnr Alan Simpson Gary Bauer Narrator James Fallows Alan Simpson Grover Norquist Alan Simpson Bruce Bartlett Grover Norquist Alan Simpson James Fallows Grover Norquist Simpson Narrator Norquist Alan Simpson James Fallows Alan Simpson Grover Norquist Alan Simpson James Fallows Romney Narrator Woman Grover Bruce Bartlett Alan Simpson Arlen Specter Mike Lofgren Narrator Lofgren Matt Kibbe Gary Bauer Matt Kibbe Alan Simpson Bruce Bartlett Narrator Sesn Hannity Dan Schnur Ron Reagan Alan Simpson Dan Schnur Sean Hannity Ron Reagan Jnr Mike Logren Narrator Specter Alan Simpson Ed Meese Ron Reagan jnr Mike Lofgren Pat Buchanan James Fallows Pat Buchanan Gary Bauer James Fallows Alan Simpson Narrator Ron Reagan Jnr Roger Porter Pat Buchanan Grover Norquist Alan Simpson Specter Ted Cruz (R) Narrator	JF: In 2006, when the Republicans lost their control of the senate and so Mitch McConnell who is the republican senator from Kentucky became the senate minority leader - he essentially said the filibuster was going to be applied to everything that came through the senate, so instead of one out of a thousand measures or one out of a hundreds it was eighty out of a hundred or ninety out of a hundred of insisting on sixty votes to get things through. AS: Well, that's what he said he would do, I know Mitch pretty well, he keeps his troops together pretty well, he rules with an iron hand, he's very clever, very shrewd, very partisan, and I think he has some allergy towards democrats, I don't know what that is but it was early gained... McConnell (R): Tasked with writing a stimulus bill that was timely, targeted and temporary, Democrats in the hosue came up with a huge spending Bill that was none of the above. Specter; Senator McConnell, the Republican leader said the Republican senate agenda was to defeat Obama in 2012 - now, is that a legislative agenda? AS: He will tell you, you know, don't work with the other side on that bill any further or try to accommodate, or I might have a new job for you, make you the ranking member of the journal committee or some lesser place in the structure. BB: The republicans have shown the Democrats exactly what to do should we have a republican president you can be guaranteed that the senate democrats will filibuster every single bill that he proposes they will filibuster every single nominee that he proposes and that the republicans who do that routinely to every one of Obama's proposals and appointees now will scream bloody murder - they'll say this is awful, this is anti-constitutional - they're just hypocritical jerks. VO: Another battle in congress was looming. Mike Lofgren had been a Republican congressional staff member for 28 years, but began to worry about the Tea Party when they refused to support what had always been a routine increase in America's debt ceiling. ML: This is about the inherently fragile institutions of our democracy, they are not automatically self-sustaining, they require an informed electorate that makes good decisions based on objective facts and not mystification. And the polarization has become so great that it threatens to simply stop the processes of government. BB: It's an institutional problem between the presidency and the congress that could ultimately lead to a constitutional crisis of some kind. VO: Arlen Specter was elected to the United States senate from Pennsylvania as a moderate Republican on the same day Ronald Reagan won the White House.. Specter later became a Republican Presidential candidate himself, but finally left the Party when his fellow Republicans refused to support emergency spending at the height of the global financial crisis... UPSOT (Specter, R): I have found myself increasingly at odds with the Republican philosophy. Specter: When I cast the vote for the stimulus package there was no doubt that I could not win a Republican primary - you could politely characterize it as ‘irreconcilable differences'... but there was no longer any room for me in the Party. UPSOT: "You'll get your just desserts. I'm leaving!! VO: Arlen Specter's defection was historic, he briefly gave Democrats the deciding vote to overcome a senate filibuster and pass Barack Obama's landmark healthcare reforms and provide economic stimulus to an economy in freefall... UPSOT Biden (D): The patient protection and affordable care act is passed (applause) JF: Since the Democrats had sixty votes for any a few months in Barack Obama's time it meant that most of the things they were trying to do they were blocked in doing - they couldn't appoint people to judgeships, they couldn't name ambassadors they couldn't get things done and so you've had kind of a historically unprecedented log-jam in American governance that is really destructive. RRJr: I mean you've got people now who are willing to - well you've got a Republican party now that has announced that they think that the full faith and credit of the united states is as Mitch McConnell put it - a good hostage to ransom. Um, and I don't think that my father would have thought too much of people like that. AS: The word ‘compromise' has become a dirty word - a compromise means you are a whimp - if you compromise pffff you're just a whimp. Well let me tell ya, if you cant learn to compromise an issue without compromising yourself, you should never be in a legislative body. GB: If one side wants the government to be bigger and my side wants the government to be smaller, what is the compromise between those two positions? Anything you agree on is either going to make government bigger or going to make government smaller. And you can go down the list on virtually every issue - either man is between a man and a woman or its something else - it cant be in between something else and a man and a woman, so I think we're going through a period in the United States where unfortunately, probably we're going to see these kinds of bruising battles and perhaps the country swinging back and forth depending on any given election which side prevails. VO: After years of war and recession, America racked-up more than $16-trillion worth of debt... one way to reduce debt is through taxation, but most Republicans have signed a pledge never to raise taxes... that pledge was inspired by the man who became it's first signatory... President Ronald Reagan... JF: The muscle, or the face of the absolutism about taxes is a man named Grover Norquist. AS: He's a nice guy with a very bad idea. GN: The taxpayer protection pledge is a written commitment that a candidate or an incumbent congressman, senator, governor, president, signs and its too the America people and it says ‘I will oppose and vote against any effort to raise your taxes.' AS: Nice idea, and when he got those signatures unemployment was, you know, 4%, inflation was you know, whatever, we owed four trillion bucks instead of sixteen - and so he's locked these people in and if they say well I'm going to repudiate that the he does a full page ad and he begins to use his money and he'll cremate you in your district. BB: The no-new taxes pledge has had an enormous impact on federal finances, its really decimated them and made it almost impossible to raise adequate revenue to fund the federal government, and the people who support this idea such as Grover Norquist have this really extremely shallow and naive view that if you just take away the governments credit card that somehow or another spending will automatically come down - this is just complete and total nonsense, and I think it misunderstands Reagan's record - if you look at his record he did indeed cut taxes sharply in 1981 but he raised taxes almost every other year of his presidency 11 different times he signed into law different tax increases. GN: Well the taxpayer protection pledge has allowed the modern republican party not only to be the party that opposes tax increases but to be branded like a product that voters KNOW that if you vote for a republican you have ivory soap percentages 99.99% certainty that they wont raise taxes. Simpson: Anyone who would sign such a pledge before they've even got into the Congress; before they heard a debate, doesn't deserve much sympathy from me. I mean what the hell can Grover do to you? He can't murder you, he can't burn down your house. The only thin he can do is defeat you for re-election putting some squirrel in your primary or putting someone in the General to bump you off and if that means more to you than your country in extremity when it needs patriots not panderers you shouldn't even be in the Congress. JF: After the Reagan era, this goal of "starving the beast" became much more of a fixed ideology of literally no new taxes and so the republicans who had historically prided themselves in the Eisenhower administration and Robert Taft as being the party of fiscal prudence, became the party of gigantic deficits. GN: We have a spending problem; the government spends too much. We don't have a lack of taxes, its not the problem. It isn't that the peasants aren't bring enough money into the King ITS THAT THE KING IS SPENDING TOO MUCH MONEY - YOU GOTTA KNOCK IT OFF.... So step one, hey hey hey, we're not giving you any more money, step two, stop spending so much... UPSOT Simpson (R): Well Grover it's good to see you face to face - we seem to blast away on each other remotely. VO: To try and find a bi-partisan solution involving a combination of spending cuts and tax increases to reign-in America's debt, President Obama appointed former Republican Senator Alan Simpson as co-commissioner for fiscal responsibility, but Simpson soon found Republicans would only consider cuts to spending, not increased taxes... because of Grover Norquists pledge, half the solution was off the table... UPSOT Norquist (R): Otherwise weak politicians - they don't govern, they just raise taxes to pay for every stupid idea they've had for the last two-hundred years and just add some new ideas to it. AS: We often ask them what they'd like to cut to get there... ‘well, waste, fraud and abuse, all earnarks, Nancy Pelosi's aircraft, foreign aid, congressional pensions' Well, that'll only get you about 5% of the hole we're in. JF: Something has to give. The tax versus debt tension for the republican party - we had the classic irresistible force and immovable object situation because they cannot plausibly be on the warpath against deficits and on the warpath against ever raising taxes. AS: You can't cut spending you way out of this hole, you cant grow your way out of this hole, you could have double-digit growth for twenty years and not grow out of this hole, and you cant tax your way out of this hole - so you have to have a blend of cutting and revenue... GN: The commitment that republicans who sign the pledge is; when I go to Washington I'm not going to raise taxes, I'm going to reform government, what the Democrats and people like Simpson want to do is raise taxes so that Washington doesn't have to reform itself. AS: I mean, what the hell... lets get serious, this guy is a monster... and he is the most powerful person in America today, but I said to him ‘you will be irrelevant in two years' cos your country cant exist on this diet of soup... JF: Its put the republicans in an untenable position - which you saw during the 2012 primaries when there was one debate where the question was suppose their was a budget deal skewed ten-to-one in favour of budget cuts spending cuts versus tax increases would you veto it and every single republican candidate raised his or her hands saying yes they would veto that even a ten-to-one, ten to one bargain... and it became difficult both for them to say debt is this huge menace to the country and we are so unreasonable that even a ten-to-one solution is out of bounds for us, so I think the Republicans, this is one more force pushing them to the extreme. UPSOT (Romney): I was a severely conservative Republican Governor. V/O: Another force arguably pushing the Republican Party to the extreme is the anti-tax Tea Party movement. UPSOT (protestor): His entire band of thugs are all communists! GN: The Republican party has become the party that will not raise your taxes, after the Tea party movement, the Republican party became the party that wanted to reign-in spending but that second half only happened more recently and came about as a result of the failure of the Bush administration to focus on restraining spending. BB: Today's run-of-the-mill, you know, Republican Tea Party member, I mean to them Ronald Reagan is like a face on Mount Rushmore, he is just someone that they worship but they don't really know anything about what he actually did - they just assume that everything he did was great and everything good that happened to the United States in the 1980's was his responsibility...err their knowledge is really very, very shallow. AS: Ronald Reagan, I knew well, I really did, there were times when he would invite us to the White House just four or five of us for an evening just to tell stories ... no business, Nancy would be off with her mother, her father down in Scotsdale - he'd say come on by, he'd be pouring wine and we'd just tell stories... and none of them are like that, none of them with big, big hearts who listen ... Reagan had democrats in the white house all the time, and republicans and they don't do that. Specter: President Reagan welcomed moderates into the White House, I was a frequent visitor to the President, he had those two chairs in the oval office and would sit down and talk to me about supporting the MX missile or supporting school prayer or supporting his program and there was a attitude that if you didn't vote his way all the time he understood... but that is not the Republican Party that I faced after my vote in favor of the stimulus package. ML: The Northeastern Republicans are virtually an extinct species, the old style moderate republican wing. VO: Almost two years into Obama's term the political tide had turned from Hope and Change to fear and anger over the struggling economy and ballooning debt, Tea party republicans won senate seats including Arlen Specter's and claimed the balance of power in the House of Representatives, handing them huge power to block the President's agenda. ML: I think by the 2010 mid-terms, once you saw the incoming members, what they were saying, I knew that they would push the debt limit increase into a crisis - they could just not help themselves. US credit rating or no, they would do that and that's what decided me to find an exit strategy. MK: When it comes to cutting a deal to expand the debt ceiling one more time, the citizens are attacked for holding politicians accountable - I don't think its about holding moderate republicans accountable, I think its about holding all politicians to the same standard. GB: I've heard for decades that the public doesn't believe politicians - they say one thing when they are running for office they go to Washington they do something else - where here were people, most of them businessmen, or entrepenuers who said look, when I say I;m going to go to Washington lower your taxes and cut government spending you can count on me, that's actually what I'm going to do... MK: To me, bipartisanship is code words for insiders inside the beltway in Washington DC cutting a deal behind closed doors. AS: I mean these guys are purists, and the thing that will destroy and has destroyed the Republican party through the decades of my existence is that they give each other the saliva test of purity. And then they lose and then they bitch for four years and wonder how they lost... BB: The culture of congress was quite different in the 1980's ... remember that the Republicans did control the senate of six of his eight years and the leadership in the house was more ‘old school' - the idea that you opposed what the other party was for but you didn't throw up insurmountable road blocks...Tip O'Neill for example, could have killed the Reagan tax cut (he was the speaker of the house by the way) could have killed the Reagan tax cut in 1981 using parliamentary procedures if he had wanted to but he didn't think that was right, he felt that Reagan's policy proposal, even though it was wrong, was worthy of being voted upon and let the people speak and let the members of congress vote their consciences or whatever...and that view is clearly not the case today. VO: One of the biggest factors in the rise of the Tea Party movement was conservative media in the form of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel... UPSOT Hannity: Welcome back to Hannity, now you just heard where things stand in the Senate. We want to focus on the House of Representatives and we've just heard that some Republican representatives are getting weak at the knees and could be caving into Democrat demands. DS: The media is one of several elements that's created such an ideologically driven hyper-polarised electorate. RRJr: Remember that most republicans just watch Fox News ... most of the republican electorate they don't listen to MSNBC they look at CNN, they don't look at ABC or any of that stuff - Fox News...you go to the middle of the country turn on television in a hotel - it'll be tuned to Fox, you might not even be able to GET other cable networks in the middle of the country - it's all Fox. So these people are getting their news filtered through Rupert Murdoch's weird little universe. A.S. Talkshows, turmoil- you pick your own channel so you can see who can stick it to the other side better than the other side. All of us are responsible for it. All of us. DS: We all want to talk to, read from and listen to the smartest people in the word. Who are the smartest people in the word? The people who agree with me. And if cable television and talk radio and the internet can provide me with an information environment that only reinforces what I already believe rather than challenge it, what you do end up with is these two ideological cul-de-sacs in which somebody with whom you disagree is no longer your opponent but your enemy. And as we saw in the debate over the federal debt limit not too long ago, it took the prospect of absolute apocalypse to get people to put aside the caricatures of their opponents and actually find a way to work together.??? SH: I think Barack Obama's biggest problem is that he's never run a business, he's met a payroll that I know of, he hung out with a lot of radical people, I think he's a rigid ideologue and I think he's wrong and I think America gave him the benefit of the doubt on his background associations, record appropriately. RRjr: They think Obama is this, this Muslim, Manchurian candidate who is out to impose sharia law and that he doesn't have a legitimate birth certificate and god knows what else ML: It's a tribute to how well Republicans can get their narrative before the public - in nice easy sound bites - most people don't realize that for the average taxpayer their taxers have been cut even relative to the low tax rates under George W Bush, so they're paying less taxes, and yet they think their taxes were raised under Obama - its an amazing piece of mystification. VO: So how have the combined forces of Fox News, The Tea Party, social conservatives and the Norquist tax pledge changed the Republican party? Specter: It is by no means the Party of Reagan, President Reagan welcomed moderates into the White House. Simpson: I though the Republican party was simply government out of your life, the precious right of privacy and the right to be left alone. That sounds like a pretty good clarion call, a certain trumpet. It I had to go before the central committee of 63 people in Wyoming to get on the ballot they wouldn't put me on the ballot. EM: It is correct that the Republican part is more conservative than it was when Ronald Reagan beca White House overlay: still images of Reagan and company drinking/laughing. Interview Interview US recession overlay Interview Interview Interview Interview Interview Interview Tea Party movement Hannity on Fox News Interview Interview Interview Interview Fox news overlay Interview Interview Interview Tea Partiers and protests. Interview Reagan portrait Interview Interview Interview Interview Interview Interview Interview Overlay: ‘Hispanics for Obama' crowds Interview Interview Interview Reagan still Interview Interview Interview Interview Interview Interview Int: Congress Congress. Senators on balcony "Kill the bill"
Jim Fallows Narrator Ron Reagan Jr: Narrator Alan Simpson ENDS	JF: Their path is bad for them, its also bad for the country as a whole because they are likely to retain significant power in the senate so they can maintain this blocking force in the senate so they are putting themselves into a minority but they are also having the power to obstruct the entire country from getting things done, so it would be better, another Reagan - a Reagan with sort of a tent-building, expanding strategy would be better for the party and better for the country. V/O: Back at Wilsons Creek, the civil war re-enactment is over for another year. The original battle fought here a century and a half ago was to stop the spread of slavery as the American frontier pushed westward. Many modern-day Republicans see a similar battle for personal liberty being fought today. But for those who head into battle in the name of Ronald Reagan his son has a simple message. RRjr: I would probably remind them that he cared more about the country than he did about his own career in politics, I would remind them that he was a grown-up, I would remind them that he was fair-minded and I would advise them to try and aspire to those qualities themselves... V/O: Right now, there little evidence of a return to moderation and compromise. So what happens if the Mad House Mess in Washington continues? Simpson. What will happen is the markets will call the shots... Washington is dysfunctional... Not til then, not til then." Fade to black. End credits.	Interview Overlay - Wilsons Creek battle march and pack up. Interview Traffic jam, Washington Capitol Building Interview Credits

Who

Script

Visual/Graphics

Open

Narrator

Vox Pops

Narrator

Pres. Obama (D)

Speaker John Boehner (R)

Senate Majority Leader: Harry Reid (D)

Fmr. Senator Alan Simpson (R)

Narrator

Fmr Senator Alan Specter (Republican 1980-2009: Democrat 2009-2010)

Narrator

Vox Pops

Narrator

Obama

Narrator

Obama

Narrator

Narrator:

Vox Pops:

Man with Mo.

Man with beard.

Narrator

Grover Norquist

Narrator

Reagan

VO: On the first of October 2013, the Federal Government of the United States of America was shut down for the first time in eighteen years.

UPSOT (Rep. Marcy Kaptur. D): Mr Speaker, we cannot continue to govern by staggering from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis. The madness must stop.

UPSOT (Boehner. R): This law is a train wreck and it is a train wreck.

UPSOT (Schumer. D): We won't be extorted now. We won't be extorted two weeks from now; we won't be extorted in December. Mr Boehner; pass our bill.

V/O: Around a million government employees were sent home without pay, federal programs and services ground to a halt, National Parks and monuments were closed... the stock market fell and America faced the possibility of an economic recession made in Washington...

UPSOT:

Woman - It's pretty rough, I mean people are not going to get paid.

Man - My wife and I just bought a new house, and I'd hate to lose it. So if this goes on for a period we might be in jeopardy.

Man - A lot of my neighbours are in the same situation, so we're all in the same boat and we really have no idea what's going to happen next.

V/O: The Obama years have seen one political crisis after another as America struggled to recover from the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression.

MONTAGE

The battle over the budget and the nation's level of debt followed:

- the fiscal cliff,

- the debt ceiling,

- the sequester; and

- annual fights in Congress over the budget.

UPSOT (Pres. Obama, D): The only thing that is keeping the government shutdown, the only thing preventing people going back to work and basic research starting back p and farmers and small business owners getting their loans. The only thing that's preventing that from happening right now, today, in the next five minutes, is because Speaker John Boehner doesn't even want to let the Bill get a yes or no vote. Because he doesn't want to anger the extremists in his own party.

UPSOT (Boehner, R): This law is not ready for prime time. The House has done its work.

UPSOT (Reid, D) As we said Friday, nothing has changed. If they try to send us something back they are spinning wheels. We are not going to change Obamacare.

Senator Alan Simpson "You've got 82 new people in Congress who didn't come to limit government, they came to stop it"

V/O: It has been the most bitterly partisan and least productive period in American political history.

Specter: There is a general feeling that the United States Government is broken, that the gridlock is intolerable and that Washington is a madhouse mess.

V/O: So, how did Washington become so dysfunctional?

How did the world's largest economy and self-proclaimed ‘beacon of democracy' reach a point of political gridlock?

Man: It's ridiculous. This is ridiculous. We gotta find a way to work this thing out. I mean people's lives depend on this. I think it's nuts they can't come to some conclusion and decision on this at all.

Man: I'm thoroughly disgusted with our politicians. As I see it right bow they're acting like a bunch of three-year old children. It's who can hold their breath the longest.

V/O: It's all a long way from the day in November 2008 when the election of Barack Obama saw a wave of hope spread across America and around the world.

CELEBRATIONS

Upsot (Obama): If there is anyway out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible

V/O: The nation built on slavery had elected its first black President.

That night in Chicago, Barack Obama echoed the words of another America President, Abraham Lincoln...

UPSOT Obama: A government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from the earth.

V/O: While Lincoln's election in 1860 triggered the American Civil War ... Obama's election triggered a political battle that has had far-reaching consequences.

FIGHTING

V/O: This is the story of how the Republican Party went to war with itself.

Fighting

V/O: These people have come from all over America to recreate a victory for the southern Confederacy who wanted to leave the US to preserve slavery.

V/O: This is Wilson's Creek in the mid western state of Missouri, 150 years to the day since a famous battle was fought on what came to be known as bloody hill...

We're not fighting the civil war again, we're trying to teach history, keep the interest in history alive and we enjoy, quite honestly, I'm in artillery, we enjoy exploding large amounts of black powered in a safe manner.

I think we're really just fighting some of the same battles again, the time of this war, the time of a centralized government, we're talking about a government making decisions that certain sections of the population don't agree with and isn't that where we are today with American politics? Where will our government go, what direction will it take - will it be free spending or will it be economically conservative or will it be socially conservative?

V/O: There are plenty of fundamental questions facing Americans today... and one man who thinks he has the answers is anti-tax Republican, Grover Norquist...

GN: The Republican Party for 100 years was the party of Lincoln - that's what defined being a republican, it meant being from the north, and people from your state were against slavery and against secession, well you know what, after 100 years even most democrats are against slavery and against secession so it doesn't distinguish republicans from democrats from a republican, most democrats are against slavery and against secession so a Lincoln republican doesn't have any meaning any more - a Reagan Republican defines a modern republican - limited government, maximizing liberty, limiting taxes and spending and control over your life, strong defense, strong enough to keep other countries from attacking you - not running an empire but having national self defense

- that's the modern republican - Reagan and his policies and his writings and his speeches is the model for the next 100 years.

V/O But while Reagan is a hero to Republicans, a fierce debate is underway about what Reagan actually stood for...

UPSOT (Reagan): That we will uphold the principles of self reliance, self discipline, morality and above all responsible liberty for every individual.

UPSOT (Santelli et al): President Obama! Are you listening?! Interjection: How about we all stop paying our mortgage - it's a moral hazard. We're thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July; all you capitalists who want to show up to Lake Michigan, I'm gonna start organizing!

Ext: Capitol building

Int : Capitol building

Congresswoman

Speaker Narrator Boenher (R)

Senator Chuck Schumer

Bring up music ‘Incidental cue 7' and fade under V/O

Shutdown footage/protest

US recession.

MUSIC STING and fade under and out ‘Incidental Music cue 7'

Washington/Congress/

WhiteHouse

Obama - lectern

House

Press conference

Interview

MUSIC STING Incidental Music cue 7...

Interview

...Music finishes of its own accord.

Chicago 2008 ‘Obama wins' celebrations.

Street celebrating

Obama Grant park victory speech...

Obama - Grant Park

Lincoln/civil war overlay

Overlay - fighting Wilson's Creek

Video: Battle sequence from Wilson's Creek.

Interview

Historical footage: Reagan

Reagan TV ad.

CNBC

Reporter: Rick Santelli

Narrator

James Fallows

V/O: The anti-tax movement has gained strength in recent years thanks to the arrival of the Tea Party movement - the TEA stands for Taxed Enough Already and harks back to the revolutionary anti-tax protest known as the Boston Tea Party when British tea was dumped in the harbor.

JF: The Tea Party Movement simultaneously added fervor and energy to the Republican side while pushing it to the extreme, I think that Mitt Romney in the 2012 general election had a much harder path to follow against Barack Obama than he would have if he hadn't had all of this Tea Party pressure during the primaries that he had to accommodate

TEA PARTY Protests

Interview

Narrator

Matt Kibbe

Narrator V/O:

Matt Kibbe is one of the most prominent Tea partiers, he's with a group called Freedomworks which finances conservative Republican candidates... he says the Tea Party began in opposition to emergency government spending as the global financial crisis hit...

MK: We trace it to the wall street bailout, and particularly when George W Bush said I'm abandoning free market principles to save the free market. Every Tea partier I know again and again and again will quote that verbatim and cite that as the moment they realized they needed to show up and fight against a government that had gotten too big, perhaps gotten too close to Wall Street and too in bed with special interests inside the DC beltway...

Establishment shot Matt Kibbe - Interview.

Tea Party protests

Interview

Dan Schnur

Matt Kibbe

These are people who watched federal spending increase under the previous Republican administration and they're suspicious of political leaders on both sides..

MK: Go back to Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan said that government was the problem not the solution ... Republicans win when they stand for something that's an alternative to the big government progressivism represented by this President.

Schnur interview

(from old page 16)

Dan Schnur

(John McCain Advisor, Republican)

Schnur: The Republican Party has always been very much of a three-legged stool. Economic conservatives on one leg, foreign policy and national security conservatives on the second, and social and cultural conservatives on the third. Now up until 2008-2009, the social conservatives had been gaining in influence. If anything what this recession has done is revitalized the economic conservative wing of the party. So the grassroots conservatives you see coming out of the Tea Party movement; they are loud, they are aggressive, they are much less willing to compromise than you're traditional economic conservative; a traditional establishment conservative.

Narrator

Vox Pops

Ronald Reagan

Sean Hannity

V/O: In 2012, the Party settled on Mitt Romney to take on Barack Obama. But it seemed all Republicans were looking for someone they couldn't have, the candidate who last stood for office in 1984... the candidate who had been dead for eight years...

Woman: Ronald Reagan (why?) conservative, wasn't afraid to cut taxes, wasn't afraid to cut the freebies to the people who just thought they deserved ‘em.

Man: He was an Iowa boy and matter of a fact my grandparents knew him and so he was just a good straightforward honest man.

Man: He was my first real exposure to politics, I saw him take us through several crises and just always thought of him as a great figure.

Man: Reagan was a pretty good one.

UPSOT ( REAGAN): I accept your nomination for the Presidency of United States.

SH: He had every quality of a great leader, strong principles, a good vision, the ability to rally the country, terrific communication skills - remember this is before the internet, this is before Fox, this is before Fox, or talk radio, this is before Rush Limbaugh, you know and he had the ability to go to the nation and say ‘we can do better'.

Republican Party straw Poll, Iowa

GOP candidates group shot on stage.

Exterior

Historical footage

Interior

Tim Pawlenty

Rick Santorum

Newt Gingrich

Michelle Bachmann

Ed Meese

Reagan

Gary Bauer

Ron Reagan Jr.

Narrator

Ed Meese

Roger Porter

Ed Meese

Roger Porter.

TP: Thirty years ago this very day, August 13^th, Ronald Reagan one of the greatest Presidents in the history of our country signed the economic recovery act into law...

RS: Margaret Thatcher when she left the prime ministership of England sais she was never able to accomplish what Ronald Reagan was able to accomplish, never able to turn the tides of socialism and that's what we're talking about here...never able to turn it back in Britain like Reagan was, what Reagan did...

NG: If you take the Reagan recovery and apply it to the current population you would add 25 million jobs, in seven years....

MB: And together we are going to make Barack Obama a one-term-president.

EM: I think the candidates would all like to be compared favorably with Ronald Reagan and they want to convince the people they follow in the footsteps of Reagan both from the standpoint of philosophy and leadership.

Reagan: The people have not created this disaster in our economy; the federal government has. It has overspebt, overestimated and over-regulated.

GB: And I think it's interesting that in this last cycle, and quite frankly most every election cycle since Ronald Reagan left the scene, every Republican vying for the nomination tries to convince the electorate that they are the true heir to the Reagan mantle.

Montage of candidates saying "Reagan"

RRjr: Everything was Reagan, Reagan, Reagan, I'm Reagan, I'm the next Reagan - but none of them are...

V/O But the worshiping of Ronald Reagan is more than just nostalgia... Reagan may be gone, but he's at the heart of a conflict over the role of government in people's lives ...

EM: He was the leading proponent of conservative principles; free market economics, individual liberty, strong national defence, traditional American values and limited government.

RP: He had a deep set of principles. That he believed in very fervently that he was reluctant to abandon or compromise. At the same time he had a remarkable capacity to understand the give and take of politics and how one needs to accommodate large numbers of interests, and viewpoints and perspectives.

EM: Ronald Reagan always stood for principle. He never compromised his principles but he would sometimes compromise on issues to get to his objectives to get to his objectives. As he used to say ‘I'll take half a loaf from Congress if that's all I can get and then once I've got that, I'll go back and try and get the rest.

RP: I remember him saying, ‘Let's see if I've got this right. We've got 80% of what we want. I don't know about you fellas' - and it was always fellas even when there were women in the room, ‘I don't know about you fellas but I think that's pretty good.' And there were always people who were thumping their chest saying we had to go back to the negotiating table and he would come in an disarm the situation by basically saying ‘I think we've got as much as we're going to get' and ‘Let's declare victory'.

Tim Pawlenty at Ames.

Historical footage: Overlay Thatcher's visit to US

Campaign event

Straw Poll

Interview

Reagan campaign ad

Interview

Overlay: Reagan campaigning

TV montage of 2012 GOP candidates saying "Reagan".

Interview

Reagan looking affable; waving to cheering crowds

Interview

Overalay: Reagan and Tip O'Neill

Stills overlay - Reagan in meetings

Narrator V/O

Ted Cruz (R)

Alan Simpson (R)

Jim McDermott (D)

Narrator

Representative Jon Kyl (Republic Senate Minority Whip)

Narrator

James Fallows

V/O: But if Ronald Reagan was happy with an 80% compromise to reach an agreement, the same can't be said of Republicans in Washington these days.

UPSOT (Cruz, R): The debt ceiling historically has been the best leverage that Congress has to rein-in the Executive.

Simpson: A zealot is someone who having forgotten his purpose, redoubles his efforts. Zealots are 100-per-centers. Show me a hundered-per-center - no matter what they're talking about - and I'll show you someone I want to stay away from.,

UPSOT (McDermott, D): They gotta have that check in the box that says I voted against Obama care (interjection). Vote No!

V/O ...virtually no Republican members of the House or Senate have been prepared to work with President Obama ... in fact they have done everything they can to stop him, including shutting down the government.

UPSOT (Kyl, R): Mr Chairman, it's courteous if you don't interrupt someone in the middle of a sentence, right in the middle of an important point they're trying to make. I have not dominated this discussion; I have not filibustered in this market we've been having.

V/O: The 2013 shutdown was a last-ditch attempt - led by Tea-Party Republicans - to stop or delay Barack Obama's health care reforms. Ironically, Obama's reforms were based on a Republican plan put into effect by his former Presidential rival, Mitt Romney.

Fallows: The merits of this plan - they are all Republican in their origin. Again, the idea of this as an alternative to real universal health care system - that had been a Republican Party plan since the 1990s and onwards... Mitt Romney as a Republican had happily introduced the plan in Massachusetts. But simply because of partisan opposition to the Obama administration putting this through, it became a life or death, party-line, absolute vote and passed by the barest of margins, it became a rallying cry - we're going to stop Obamacare and stop Obama himself.

Capitol Building exterior, maybe interior of senate or house from C-span.

Ted Cruz - TV interview

Interview, Simpson

Congress

Narrator

Simpson (R)

V/O: While Republicans command a majority in the House of Representatives, Democrats have the numbers in the Senate - but a tactic called the filibuster allows the minority party to stop bills they don't like ever going to a vote... unless the majority part can muster 60 votes...

Simpson: Well the filibuster is like an automatic butt-kicking machine: It goes around with a boot on it and sometimes it will be very helpful to you and sometimes it will be harmful to you but they're not going to change it. But there's a way to handle the filibuster and it's three words: Bring. A. Cot.

Ext. Capitol building

Int. Capitol building

Interview

James fallows

Alan Simpson

Senator Mitch McConnell

Sen. Arlen Specter

Alan Simpson

Bruce Bartlett

Narrator

Mike Lofgren

Bartlett

Narrator

Specter

Specter protester

Narrator

Vice President Joe Biden (Democrat)

James Fallows

Ron Reagan Jnr

Alan Simpson

Gary Bauer

Narrator

James Fallows

Alan Simpson

Grover Norquist

Alan Simpson

Bruce Bartlett

Grover Norquist

Alan Simpson

James Fallows

Grover Norquist

Simpson

Narrator

Norquist

Alan Simpson

James Fallows

Alan Simpson

Grover Norquist

Alan Simpson

James Fallows

Romney

Narrator

Woman

Grover

Bruce Bartlett

Alan Simpson

Arlen Specter

Mike Lofgren

Narrator

Lofgren

Matt Kibbe

Gary Bauer

Matt Kibbe

Alan Simpson

Bruce Bartlett

Narrator

Sesn Hannity

Dan Schnur

Ron Reagan

Alan Simpson

Dan Schnur

Sean Hannity

Ron Reagan Jnr

Mike Logren

Narrator

Specter

Alan Simpson

Ed Meese

Ron Reagan jnr

Mike Lofgren

Pat Buchanan

James Fallows

Pat Buchanan

Gary Bauer

James Fallows

Alan Simpson

Narrator

Ron Reagan Jnr

Roger Porter

Pat Buchanan

Grover Norquist

Alan Simpson

Specter

Ted Cruz (R)

Narrator

JF: In 2006, when the Republicans lost their control of the senate and so Mitch McConnell who is the republican senator from Kentucky became the senate minority leader - he essentially said the filibuster was going to be applied to everything that came through the senate, so instead of one out of a thousand measures or one out of a hundreds it was eighty out of a hundred or ninety out of a hundred of insisting on sixty votes to get things through.

AS: Well, that's what he said he would do, I know Mitch pretty well, he keeps his troops together pretty well, he rules with an iron hand, he's very clever, very shrewd, very partisan, and I think he has some allergy towards democrats, I don't know what that is but it was early gained...

McConnell (R): Tasked with writing a stimulus bill that was timely, targeted and temporary, Democrats in the hosue came up with a huge spending Bill that was none of the above.

Specter; Senator McConnell, the Republican leader said the Republican senate agenda was to defeat Obama in 2012 - now, is that a legislative agenda?

AS: He will tell you, you know, don't work with the other side on that bill any further or try to accommodate, or I might have a new job for you, make you the ranking member of the journal committee or some lesser place in the structure.

BB: The republicans have shown the Democrats exactly what to do should we have a republican president you can be guaranteed that the senate democrats will filibuster every single bill that he proposes they will filibuster every single nominee that he proposes and that the republicans who do that routinely to every one of Obama's proposals and appointees now will scream bloody murder - they'll say this is awful, this is anti-constitutional - they're just hypocritical jerks.

VO: Another battle in congress was looming. Mike Lofgren had been a Republican congressional staff member for 28 years, but began to worry about the Tea Party when they refused to support what had always been a routine increase in America's debt ceiling.

ML: This is about the inherently fragile institutions of our democracy, they are not automatically self-sustaining, they require an informed electorate that makes good decisions based on objective facts and not mystification. And the polarization has become so great that it threatens to simply stop the processes of government.

BB: It's an institutional problem between the presidency and the congress that could ultimately lead to a constitutional crisis of some kind.

VO: Arlen Specter was elected to the United States senate from Pennsylvania as a moderate Republican on the same day Ronald Reagan won the White House.. Specter later became a Republican Presidential candidate himself, but finally left the Party when his fellow Republicans refused to support emergency spending at the height of the global financial crisis...

UPSOT (Specter, R): I have found myself increasingly at odds with the Republican philosophy.

Specter: When I cast the vote for the stimulus package there was no doubt that I could not win a Republican primary - you could politely characterize it as ‘irreconcilable differences'... but there was no longer any room for me in the Party.

UPSOT: "You'll get your just desserts. I'm leaving!!

VO: Arlen Specter's defection was historic, he briefly gave Democrats the deciding vote to overcome a senate filibuster and pass Barack Obama's landmark healthcare reforms and provide economic stimulus to an economy in freefall...

UPSOT Biden (D): The patient protection and affordable care act is passed (applause)

JF: Since the Democrats had sixty votes for any a few months in Barack Obama's time it meant that most of the things they were trying to do they were blocked in doing - they couldn't appoint people to judgeships, they couldn't name ambassadors they couldn't get things done and so you've had kind of a historically unprecedented log-jam in American governance that is really destructive.

RRJr: I mean you've got people now who are willing to - well you've got a Republican party now that has announced that they think that the full faith and credit of the united states is as Mitch McConnell put it - a good hostage to ransom. Um, and I don't think that my father would have thought too much of people like that.

AS: The word ‘compromise' has become a dirty word - a compromise means you are a whimp - if you compromise pffff you're just a whimp. Well let me tell ya, if you cant learn to compromise an issue without compromising yourself, you should never be in a legislative body.

GB: If one side wants the government to be bigger and my side wants the government to be smaller, what is the compromise between those two positions? Anything you agree on is either going to make government bigger or going to make government smaller. And you can go down the list on virtually every issue - either man is between a man and a woman or its something else - it cant be in between something else and a man and a woman, so I think we're going through a period in the United States where unfortunately, probably we're going to see these kinds of bruising battles and perhaps the country swinging back and forth depending on any given election which side prevails.

VO: After years of war and recession, America racked-up more than $16-trillion worth of debt... one way to reduce debt is through taxation, but most Republicans have signed a pledge never to raise taxes... that pledge was inspired by the man who became it's first signatory... President Ronald Reagan...

JF: The muscle, or the face of the absolutism about taxes is a man named Grover Norquist.

AS: He's a nice guy with a very bad idea.

GN: The taxpayer protection pledge is a written commitment that a candidate or an incumbent congressman, senator, governor, president, signs and its too the America people and it says ‘I will oppose and vote against any effort to raise your taxes.'

AS: Nice idea, and when he got those signatures unemployment was, you know, 4%, inflation was you know, whatever, we owed four trillion bucks instead of sixteen - and so he's locked these people in and if they say well I'm going to repudiate that the he does a full page ad and he begins to use his money and he'll cremate you in your district.

BB: The no-new taxes pledge has had an enormous impact on federal finances, its really decimated them and made it almost impossible to raise adequate revenue to fund the federal government, and the people who support this idea such as Grover Norquist have this really extremely shallow and naive view that if you just take away the governments credit card that somehow or another spending will automatically come down - this is just complete and total nonsense, and I think it misunderstands Reagan's record - if you look at his record he did indeed cut taxes sharply in 1981 but he raised taxes almost every other year of his presidency 11 different times he signed into law different tax increases.

GN: Well the taxpayer protection pledge has allowed the modern republican party not only to be the party that opposes tax increases but to be branded like a product that voters KNOW that if you vote for a republican you have ivory soap percentages 99.99% certainty that they wont raise taxes.

Simpson: Anyone who would sign such a pledge before they've even got into the Congress; before they heard a debate, doesn't deserve much sympathy from me. I mean what the hell can Grover do to you? He can't murder you, he can't burn down your house. The only thin he can do is defeat you for re-election putting some squirrel in your primary or putting someone in the General to bump you off and if that means more to you than your country in extremity when it needs patriots not panderers you shouldn't even be in the Congress.

JF: After the Reagan era, this goal of "starving the beast" became much more of a fixed ideology of literally no new taxes and so the republicans who had historically prided themselves in the Eisenhower administration and Robert Taft as being the party of fiscal prudence, became the party of gigantic deficits.

GN: We have a spending problem; the government spends too much. We don't have a lack of taxes, its not the problem. It isn't that the peasants aren't bring enough money into the King ITS THAT THE KING IS SPENDING TOO MUCH MONEY - YOU GOTTA KNOCK IT OFF.... So step one, hey hey hey, we're not giving you any more money, step two, stop spending so much...

UPSOT Simpson (R): Well Grover it's good to see you face to face - we seem to blast away on each other remotely.

VO: To try and find a bi-partisan solution involving a combination of spending cuts and tax increases to reign-in America's debt, President Obama appointed former Republican Senator Alan Simpson as co-commissioner for fiscal responsibility, but Simpson soon found Republicans would only consider cuts to spending, not increased taxes... because of Grover Norquists pledge, half the solution was off the table...

UPSOT Norquist (R): Otherwise weak politicians - they don't govern, they just raise taxes to pay for every stupid idea they've had for the last two-hundred years and just add some new ideas to it.

AS: We often ask them what they'd like to cut to get there... ‘well, waste, fraud and abuse, all earnarks, Nancy Pelosi's aircraft, foreign aid, congressional pensions' Well, that'll only get you about 5% of the hole we're in.

JF: Something has to give. The tax versus debt tension for the republican party - we had the classic irresistible force and immovable object situation because they cannot plausibly be on the warpath against deficits and on the warpath against ever raising taxes.

AS: You can't cut spending you way out of this hole, you cant grow your way out of this hole, you could have double-digit growth for twenty years and not grow out of this hole, and you cant tax your way out of this hole - so you have to have a blend of cutting and revenue...

GN: The commitment that republicans who sign the pledge is; when I go to Washington I'm not going to raise taxes, I'm going to reform government, what the Democrats and people like Simpson want to do is raise taxes so that Washington doesn't have to reform itself.

AS: I mean, what the hell... lets get serious, this guy is a monster... and he is the most powerful person in America today, but I said to him ‘you will be irrelevant in two years' cos your country cant exist on this diet of soup...

JF: Its put the republicans in an untenable position - which you saw during the 2012 primaries when there was one debate where the question was suppose their was a budget deal skewed ten-to-one in favour of budget cuts spending cuts versus tax increases would you veto it and every single republican candidate raised his or her hands saying yes they would veto that even a ten-to-one, ten to one bargain... and it became difficult both for them to say debt is this huge menace to the country and we are so unreasonable that even a ten-to-one solution is out of bounds for us, so I think the Republicans, this is one more force pushing them to the extreme.

UPSOT (Romney): I was a severely conservative Republican Governor.

V/O: Another force arguably pushing the Republican Party to the extreme is the anti-tax Tea Party movement.

UPSOT (protestor): His entire band of thugs are all communists!

GN: The Republican party has become the party that will not raise your taxes, after the Tea party movement, the Republican party became the party that wanted to reign-in spending but that second half only happened more recently and came about as a result of the failure of the Bush administration to focus on restraining spending.

BB: Today's run-of-the-mill, you know, Republican Tea Party member, I mean to them Ronald Reagan is like a face on Mount Rushmore, he is just someone that they worship but they don't really know anything about what he actually did - they just assume that everything he did was great and everything good that happened to the United States in the 1980's was his responsibility...err their knowledge is really very, very shallow.

AS: Ronald Reagan, I knew well, I really did, there were times when he would invite us to the White House just four or five of us for an evening just to tell stories ... no business, Nancy would be off with her mother, her father down in Scotsdale - he'd say come on by, he'd be pouring wine and we'd just tell stories... and none of them are like that, none of them with big, big hearts who listen ... Reagan had democrats in the white house all the time, and republicans and they don't do that.

Specter: President Reagan welcomed moderates into the White House, I was a frequent visitor to the President, he had those two chairs in the oval office and would sit down and talk to me about supporting the MX missile or supporting school prayer or supporting his program and there was a attitude that if you didn't vote his way all the time he understood... but that is not the Republican Party that I faced after my vote in favor of the stimulus package.

ML: The Northeastern Republicans are virtually an extinct species, the old style moderate republican wing.

VO: Almost two years into Obama's term the political tide had turned from Hope and Change to fear and anger over the struggling economy and ballooning debt, Tea party republicans won senate seats including Arlen Specter's and claimed the balance of power in the House of Representatives, handing them huge power to block the President's agenda.

ML: I think by the 2010 mid-terms, once you saw the incoming members, what they were saying, I knew that they would push the debt limit increase into a crisis - they could just not help themselves. US credit rating or no, they would do that and that's what decided me to find an exit strategy.

MK: When it comes to cutting a deal to expand the debt ceiling one more time, the citizens are attacked for holding politicians accountable - I don't think its about holding moderate republicans accountable, I think its about holding all politicians to the same standard.

GB: I've heard for decades that the public doesn't believe politicians - they say one thing when they are running for office they go to Washington they do something else - where here were people, most of them businessmen, or entrepenuers who said look, when I say I;m going to go to Washington lower your taxes and cut government spending you can count on me, that's actually what I'm going to do...

MK: To me, bipartisanship is code words for insiders inside the beltway in Washington DC cutting a deal behind closed doors.

AS: I mean these guys are purists, and the thing that will destroy and has destroyed the Republican party through the decades of my existence is that they give each other the saliva test of purity. And then they lose and then they bitch for four years and wonder how they lost...

BB: The culture of congress was quite different in the 1980's ... remember that the Republicans did control the senate of six of his eight years and the leadership in the house was more ‘old school' - the idea that you opposed what the other party was for but you didn't throw up insurmountable road blocks...Tip O'Neill for example, could have killed the Reagan tax cut (he was the speaker of the house by the way) could have killed the Reagan tax cut in 1981 using parliamentary procedures if he had wanted to but he didn't think that was right, he felt that Reagan's policy proposal, even though it was wrong, was worthy of being voted upon and let the people speak and let the members of congress vote their consciences or whatever...and that view is clearly not the case today.

VO: One of the biggest factors in the rise of the Tea Party movement was conservative media in the form of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel...

UPSOT Hannity: Welcome back to Hannity, now you just heard where things stand in the Senate. We want to focus on the House of Representatives and we've just heard that some Republican representatives are getting weak at the knees and could be caving into Democrat demands.

DS: The media is one of several elements that's created such an ideologically driven hyper-polarised electorate.

RRJr: Remember that most republicans just watch Fox News ... most of the republican electorate they don't listen to MSNBC they look at CNN, they don't look at ABC or any of that stuff - Fox News...you go to the middle of the country turn on television in a hotel - it'll be tuned to Fox, you might not even be able to GET other cable networks in the middle of the country - it's all Fox. So these people are getting their news filtered through Rupert Murdoch's weird little universe.

A.S. Talkshows, turmoil- you pick your own channel so you can see who can stick it to the other side better than the other side. All of us are responsible for it. All of us.

DS: We all want to talk to, read from and listen to the smartest people in the word. Who are the smartest people in the word? The people who agree with me. And if cable television and talk radio and the internet can provide me with an information environment that only reinforces what I already believe rather than challenge it, what you do end up with is these two ideological cul-de-sacs in which somebody with whom you disagree is no longer your opponent but your enemy. And as we saw in the debate over the federal debt limit not too long ago, it took the prospect of absolute apocalypse to get people to put aside the caricatures of their opponents and actually find a way to work together.???

SH: I think Barack Obama's biggest problem is that he's never run a business, he's met a payroll that I know of, he hung out with a lot of radical people, I think he's a rigid ideologue and I think he's wrong and I think America gave him the benefit of the doubt on his background associations, record appropriately.

RRjr: They think Obama is this, this Muslim, Manchurian candidate who is out to impose sharia law and that he doesn't have a legitimate birth certificate and god knows what else

ML: It's a tribute to how well Republicans can get their narrative before the public - in nice easy sound bites - most people don't realize that for the average taxpayer their taxers have been cut even relative to the low tax rates under George W Bush, so they're paying less taxes, and yet they think their taxes were raised under Obama - its an amazing piece of mystification.

VO: So how have the combined forces of Fox News, The Tea Party, social conservatives and the Norquist tax pledge changed the Republican party?

Specter: It is by no means the Party of Reagan, President Reagan welcomed moderates into the White House.

Simpson: I though the Republican party was simply government out of your life, the precious right of privacy and the right to be left alone. That sounds like a pretty good clarion call, a certain trumpet. It I had to go before the central committee of 63 people in Wyoming to get on the ballot they wouldn't put me on the ballot.

EM: It is correct that the Republican part is more conservative than it was when Ronald Reagan beca
White House overlay: still images of Reagan and company drinking/laughing.

Interview

US recession overlay

Interview

Tea Party movement

Hannity on Fox News

Interview

Fox news overlay

Interview

Tea Partiers and protests.

Interview

Reagan portrait

Interview

Overlay: ‘Hispanics for Obama' crowds

Interview

Reagan still

Interview

Int: Congress

Congress.

Senators on balcony "Kill the bill"

Jim Fallows

Narrator

Ron Reagan Jr:

Narrator

Alan Simpson

ENDS

JF: Their path is bad for them, its also bad for the country as a whole because they are likely to retain significant power in the senate so they can maintain this blocking force in the senate so they are putting themselves into a minority but they are also having the power to obstruct the entire country from getting things done, so it would be better, another Reagan - a Reagan with sort of a tent-building, expanding strategy would be better for the party and better for the country.

V/O: Back at Wilsons Creek, the civil war re-enactment is over for another year. The original battle fought here a century and a half ago was to stop the spread of slavery as the American frontier pushed westward. Many modern-day Republicans see a similar battle for personal liberty being fought today. But for those who head into battle in the name of Ronald Reagan his son has a simple message.

RRjr: I would probably remind them that he cared more about the country than he did about his own career in politics, I would remind them that he was a grown-up, I would remind them that he was fair-minded and I would advise them to try and aspire to those qualities themselves...

V/O: Right now, there little evidence of a return to moderation and compromise. So what happens if the Mad House Mess in Washington continues?

Simpson. What will happen is the markets will call the shots... Washington is dysfunctional...

Not til then, not til then."

Fade to black.

End credits.

Interview

Overlay - Wilsons Creek battle march and pack up.

Interview

Traffic jam, Washington

Capitol Building

Interview

Credits

Print

Film: Mad House Mess

http://www.journeyman.tv/film/5947

Transcript