[matthewdgreen]

The key word here is "sufficient consensus." Your judgement of sufficiency is a personal opinion.

I could, for example, define "sufficient consensus" as requiring that all laws require a 90% supermajority in the Senate. Or I could reduce this to 50% of the Senate. Alternatively I could reform Congress so that lawmaking requires voting totals representing 50% of the population.

Each of these is one possible version of "sufficient consensus", and still none of them actually matches the version we actually have. What is clear is that the sclerotic nature of today's Congress is problematic, and it's doing a great deal to undermine faith in our democratic system.