This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday. There are plenty of reasons people here in D.C. roll their eyes when someone mentions Aaron Sorkin. The screenwriter and playwright sent a generation of operatives to Washington who believed witty hallway banter was a substitute for reading the footnotes of a whitepaper, who obsessed over clever tactics instead of baseline principles.