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The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America
October 27, 2022 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Thursday, October 27
Hybrid Event
In-person: 12:00 pm, lunch; 12:30 pm to 1:30pm, program
Zoom: 12:30 pm to 1:30pm
In a moderated conversation with William Galston of the Brookings Institution, the author of The Betrayal: How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandoned America, Ira Shapiro, will detail how the U.S. Senate responded to the challenges posed by the Trump administration and its prospects under President Biden. The Founding Fathers gave the U.S. Senate many functions, but it had one fundamental responsibility—its raison d’etre: to provide the check against a dangerous president who threatened our democracy. Two hundred and thirty years later, when Donald Trump, a potential authoritarian, finally reached the White House, the Senate should have served as both America’s first and last lines of defense. Instead, we had the nightmare scenario: today’s Senate, reduced through a long period of decline to a hyper-partisan, gridlocked shadow of its former self, was unable to meet its fundamental responsibility.
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More About Our Author & Moderator
Ira Shapiro’s forty-five-year Washington career has focused on American politics and international trade. Shapiro served twelve years in senior staff positions in the U.S. Senate, working for a series of distinguished senators: Jacob Javits, Gaylord Nelson, Abraham Ribicoff, Thomas Eagleton, Robert Byrd, and Jay Rockefeller. He served in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative during the Clinton administration, first as general counsel and then chief negotiator with Japan and Canada, with the rank of ambassador. He is the author of two previous critically acclaimed books about the Senate: The Last Great Senate: Courage and Statesmanship in Times of Crisis and Broken: Can the Senate Save Itself and the Country? Shapiro resides in Bethesda, Maryland.
William A. Galston, holds the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a Senior Fellow. Prior to January 2006 he was the Saul Stern Professor and Acting Dean at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, founding director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), and executive director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal, co-chaired by former Secretary of Education William Bennett and former Senator Sam Nunn. A participant in six presidential campaigns, he served from 1993 to 1995 as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy. Galston is the author of nine books and more than 100 articles in the fields of political theory, public policy, and American politics. His most recent books are Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy (Yale, 2018), Public Matters (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), and The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge, 2004). A winner of the American Political Science Association’s Hubert H. Humphrey Award, Galston was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. Galston has appeared on all the principal television networks and is frequently interviewed on NPR. He writes a weekly column for the Wall Street Journal.
COVID vaccination with booster required for entry; click here to learn more about WNDC’s COVID safety policies.