[scott_s]

I felt the author made a good point related to this, that the current system, and the current belief in its self-corrections, may be a serious problem during deadlock:

"When politicians today praise America’s system of checks and balances, they seem to understand it as a self-correcting mechanism: When one branch pushes too hard, the other branches must push back, preserving equilibrium. That understanding actually encourages politicians to overreact, in the belief that they are playing a vital constitutional role. It also encourages complacency, because a system that rights itself requires no painful compromises to preserve."

The problem the author points out with the American constitution is not that we have deadlock, and then we must compromise to get around that deadlock. The problem the author points out is that we can get deadlock, and the system itself has no recovery mechanism for bad actors; deadlock makes it possible for the entire system to collapse. Parliamentary systems have new elections when the existing government cannot reach a deal. That is, the system itself has a failsafe for true deadlock.