What if Washington politics were no longer defined by partisan gridlock but instead by a cross-party alliance that forged solutions? The alliance would be unstoppable.
That's the premise of the new book "
Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State" by longtime political activist and five-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who contends that such a left-right alliance is not just the stuff of imagination but is actually emerging.
"On Capitol Hill, I'm seeing more and more in Congress, left and right," Nader told "
The Fine Print." "It was a vote in the House over a year ago over the NSA snooping, it almost broke through ... so we're beginning to see formulations that once they click together, they're unstoppable."
Nader was referring to a vote in July 2013 over a measure known as the Amash Amendment that would have curtailed the National Security Agency's ability to collect bulk phone call data. The measure narrowly failed by 12 votes, in part due to a concerted White House lobbying effort on Capitol Hill.
Nader expects there is going to be a growth of left-right alliances in Congress, pointing to the war on drugs and bank regulatory efforts as areas of possibly confluence. On the war on drugs, Nader said that the United States should entirely decriminalize and move to regulate all drugs in the same way alcohol and tobacco are regulated.