00:00We are going to have to have some structural reforms
00:03in our government to make the federal government work.
00:09This by design, as you know Doris, by design,
00:17decentralizes power.
00:19And you can make an argument that the presidency
00:23and the executive branch has become too powerful
00:26relative to the legislative branch.
00:31Maybe the judicial branch, always the least dangerous branch.
00:35But, for most of our lifetimes at least,
00:40you had a function in Congress.
00:42And you had a somewhat,
00:47and you had a loyal opposition in the sense that
00:52whoever was out of power was still interested
00:55in getting things done
00:57and was still following certain norms
01:01and institutional practices
01:04that allowed government to deliver.
01:08And I think that in addition to this challenge
01:12of how we're getting our information,
01:14which right now is making us all fearful of each other,
01:18we have to redesign how the federal government at least works
01:24so that it can actually get stuff done.
01:28And I'll give you one example
01:31that plagued me during my presidency,
01:34and even during my presidency,
01:36I was convinced we needed to get rid of it,
01:39is the practice of the filibuster,
01:41which is not in the Constitution.
01:43It is a practice that was adopted almost by accident
01:50by the Senate,
01:51and then exploited, but mildly exploited,
01:56mainly, frankly, by Dixiecrats
01:59to prevent civil rights legislation from getting through.
02:03So Southern Democrats were some of the worst practitioners
02:07of the filibuster, but it was rarely used.
02:09By the time I got to office,
02:12and Mitch McConnell, who was the Senate leader
02:15on the Republican side
02:17when the Republicans took control of the Senate in 2010,
02:25essentially just rewrote the Constitution
02:29so that you had to have a supermajority
02:32to get anything through the Senate.
02:36And what happens there is people start getting very cynical
02:40if they elect somebody who seems idealistic
02:44and has a great plan,
02:45and then suddenly it just hits a wall,
02:49and that happens again and again and again.
02:52After a certain point, people feel like,
02:54well, nobody's listening to me.
02:57And that cynicism, which also is fed by the media,
03:00is the thing that is robbing us of our capacity
03:03to feel hopeful or to work together.
03:06And we used to have stickers in my White House
03:09that my chief of staff, Dennis McDonough, put together.
03:13It just said, fight cynicism,
03:15because that is the enemy of democracy.
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