[jfengel]

Congress can't do much of anything. Their ability to pass anything more important than naming a post office is essentially nil. They can't even perform the basic operation of keeping the government open, except by heroic last-minute effort.

Congress' rules were designed to protect minority opinions, and they're easily taken advantage of to prevent anything from happening at all. A fair number of Congresspeople were elected with the specific goal of locking Congress up, and they're pretty effective at it.

[wobbly_bush]

In Parliamentary system this is somewhat equivalent to "hung parliament" and usually results in re-elections. Governments must prove minimum support to pass legislations before they can claim to be "in charge"

[jfengel]

We deliberately designed it this way, to prevent one party from having too much control.

Instead, we have no control. The legislature is effectively useless. The executive branch continues on, under not-always-clear authority. The judicial branch can easily throw a wrench into that authority, often more for political reasons than legalistic ones.

It's really, really bad.

[mrguyorama]

Don't be hand wavey though, there's only one political party doing this bullshit, and they've been open about their strategy and goal since at least Obama, and possibly even as far back as Newt Gringrich.

And they seemed to have no problem "getting things done" when the task was to ram through a supreme court justice right before an election after spending a year saying you cannot approve a supreme court justice "during an election year"