E.J. Dionne joins Tom to talk politics.
The State of the Union speech was supposed to have taken place last night; it's been rescheduled for next Tuesday. This is the first time since 1986 that a State of the Union has been delayed, when Ronald Reagan was slated to address Congress on the same day as the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
The longest government shutdown in U.S. history, which ended last Friday, was a disaster of a different kind. An estimated 800,000 federal workers missed two paychecks and many questioned whether American institutions could be trusted with the basic task of governing.
E.J. Dionne is a longtime syndicated columnist for The Washington Post, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture program at Georgetown University. His latest book, co-authored with Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, is called One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate and the Not-Yet Deported. It’s now available in paperback.
