Congress can’t get anything done because the Republicans have shifted so far to the right as to become “the insurgent outlier in American politics.” These two centrist pundits now attack the media and political scholars for implying “that the two sides are equally implicated”; to be fair and balanced, they argue, commentators should admit that one side is worse than the other. The problem Mann and Ornstein identify is that the U.S. Congressional system isn’t set up to deal with two parties that are in complete ideological opposition: unlike the Parliamentary system, it requires compromise and cross-party co-operation to pass legislation. If a party doesn’t want to compromise, they have plenty of tools at their disposal to block any government action.