[fc417fc802]

> a relic of the Republican party's destructionist agenda of the past four decades.

I believe it goes all the way back to the founding of the country. Gridlock was viewed as preferable to tyranny. Failure to arrive at a compromise is supposed to mean that no one gets to proceed.

Of course times change and cracks show up in the system.

[mindslight]

Maybe. As a libertarian I'm sympathetic to the concept. I would say that one of the huge founding assumptions which clearly no longer holds is that the federal government was meant to be a less-powerful mediator between states, with the individual states being more powerful. For example I'd imagine that the founders' solution to our current predicament would be individual states calling up their own sizeable militias to put down the lawless gangs (regardless of whether they were purportedly "authorized" by the federal government), only calling for federal government help if they desired it. Restoring order within a state shouldn't hinge upon Congress agreeing to do so, right? Of course the obvious inapplicability of that solution to the events of the Civil War demonstrates how we got to the point we're at. It looks like slavery is still on track to being the great stain that ultimately dooms us.