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There have been plenty of godawful Mayors and Governors: thieves, idiots, ideologues, incompetents. But voters rarely rate candidates for their managerial skills, and then vote accordingly.

I don't know if people are in an information vacuum or are they strategically don't acknowledge it, but there is like a lot of very iffy executive actions and constructed court precedents that built your world and you like me probably like. But that was something the legislature was supposed to do.

The are abdicating all of their power every day

You could make an argument that the root cause for the legislature abandoning its job is in equal parts gerrymandering and propaganda (which has its roots in consolidation in corporate media)

i feel like the house+senate failing to pass a budget should trigger a snap election of all the members of both chambers. maybe that fixes things?

I’ve been noodling expanding the house dramatically and changing the senates role from “has to pass an identical bill” to “can pass amendments that have to get an up or down vote in the house”.

It was supposed to be the strongest branch, in a world of untrustworthy branches. House gets power of the purse. You cannot plan on assuming obsequiousness, on abrogation

We settled on an interpretative regime because it’s impossible for a legislative body to consider all the details of every iteration of every possible downstream effect of the implementation of its intent. Legal precedent and the regulatory development process are outgrowths of that impossibility.

Did @gregdoucette.bsky.social ghost write this

Good summary, the system wasn’t designed to withstand one branch just giving up. IMO gerrymandering is the critical element in the legislature breaking. No deals at home, no deals in DC. Fixing the legislature will require re-establishing logical voting district boundaries.

Instead of a litany of little agreements and give-and-take we get hardliners elected under the promise they won't let anything slip by them. And if they ever compromise to win a different game they're also playing? Well, see the blowback AOC gets when she compromises even a little.

A better word is a dysfunctional Congress.

And for Republicans that’s a feature, not a bug. One example of this is GenZ growing up having no faith in government because they never seen successful a legislature in their lifetime. Disenchanted young people works to the Republicans’ advantage.

Right, the filibuster is a huge vector of causation here. If political parties with majorities can’t govern or legislate, someone else will! I mean, say what you will about state legislatures, you can see the will of the people (sometimes it’s really shitty) enacted at the state level

Having a party that is just a grab bag of every piece of resentment and paranoia this country has ever had since its founding while having a system designed to make it very easy for a minority party to gum everything up seems like a bad recipe.

Filibuster turns out breaks a democracy. Unable to do anything without 75% support *except* cut taxes via budget reconciliation, your government is paralyzed. Previously you could bribe senators to break ranks using earmarks; that was killed, and laws became impossible to pass.

Minsky cycle, but for political stability.