Of late, a great many folks have commented on the increasingly dysfunctional nature of Congress. 

A favorite target is the filibuster which has, in many ways, transformed any legislative action from requiring a simple majority to requiring a super majority of sixty votes. 

Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress observed:

We’re suffering from an incoherent institutional set-up in the senate. You can have a system in which a defeated minority still gets a share of governing authority and participates constructively in the victorious majority’s governing agenda, shaping policy around the margins in ways more to their liking. Or you can have a system in which a defeated minority rejects the majority’s governing agenda out of hand, seeks opening for attack, and hopes that failure on the part of the majority will bring them to power. But right now we have both simultaneously. It’s a system in which the minority benefits if the government fails, and the minority has the power to ensure failure. It’s insane, and it needs to be changed.

Yglesias expanded his point here:

Maybe “ungovernable” was not a good word for this, but I meant to convey the fact that the political system seems incapable of addressing large-scale objective problems. For example, there’s the long-term fiscal deficit. For another example, there’s anthropogenic climate change. For another example, our tax code is a very inefficient means of raising revenue. For a final one, our health care system involves a massive level of waste. These are real problems, not just ideological bugaboos. And I don’t think anything from the Bush administration experience should give us confidence that they’re solvable. Mostly Bush got “a lot done” by dodging those problems. When he did edge toward tackling them—his tax reform commission, for example—he got nowhere.

Members of Congress hold more conservative positions than the general population on a host of issues – from taxation to war to health care.  The structural problems of American government aren’t exactly new; Sanford Levinson explored them in depth in his book Our Undemocratic Constitution: 

James L. Sundquist, a political scientist who has given much thought to this issue, believes that the Constitution fundamentally discourages the likelihood of creating an effective government. He views the frequency of elections for the House of Representatives-the entire membership runs for reelection every two years-as impairing the achievement of a strong consensus among president, House, and Senate as to what the country needs.

 Several things are important here – first the filibuster has gone from the old image of the Senator standing at the podium and speaking until he couldn’t to the simple threat to filibuster.  The filibuster is essentially a pain free way to stop legislation today compared to the past.  There are also factors – such as the increased polarization of American politics – that have contributed.  Today’s Republicans are significantly more conservative than their forebears from the sixties. 

From TPM:

It was always understood that legislation thought deeply inimical to one or more states’ most vital interests might be opposed with every resource at the disposal of an individual Senator or group of Senators. The inhibitions — all of them unwritten — against deploying those resources routinely, though, were considerable. If this had not been the case, legislation like the 1986 Tax Reform Act (which overhauled the entire federal tax code), the Goldwater-Nichols bill of that year restructuring the Pentagon, and the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments could never have been enacted.

 Within today’s Senate it appears understood that these inhibitions are all gone now. Even the threat of extended debate — the traditional filibuster — has degenerated into the threat to prevent debate, by objecting to the motion to proceed to legislation. Southern segregationists in the 1960s, facing the passage of voting rights legislation aimed at uprooting the foundations of their states’ political and social order, did not go as far in obstructing the consideration of legislation as opponents of health care reform are going today.

Ultimately the real dividing point seems to be the willingness of Republicans to simply refuse to play any constructive role in governing.  Add to that the mendacity of people like Joe Lieberman and what you see is an institution that has become so deeply dysfunctional is unable to address the very real problems of the nation. 

Part of the problem is the odd belief that Senators are not simply colleagues but that they must feel for one another some sort of meaningful friendship.  So rather than tell Joe Lieberman to go pound sand, the Democrats give him a chairmanship to make him feel good about himself.  It’s as if the Senate has become a body of toddlers.

The House, a more majoritarian institution, isn’t much better but it seems captured in the endless dynamic of the eternal campaign, unable to focus on policy, obsessed instead with somehow scoring political points. 

Some of this is the result of institutional drift over the last few years – a Republican Congress entirely too chummy with a Republican president and willing to abandon its role – but some of it is the sign of deeper problems, including the unwillingness of members to see their job as governing a whole nation, not simply representing the parochial concerns of their districts.