It's all their fault.
We really are experiencing the worst Congress, ever. Or at least in modern times. There are a lot of ways to quantify that (50+ votes in the House to repeal Obamacare?), but the Brookings Institute's Sarah Binder has come up with a
particularly elegant one. Using unsigned editorials in
The New York Times from 1947 through 2013, Binder determined the critical issues each Congress was dealing with—those covered at least four times in editorials. Then she looked to see how many of those salient issues were resolved by Congress. By 2013, fully 75 percent of the critical issues on Congress's agenda were blocked by gridlock.
And by "gridlock," Brooking's Thomas Mann
wants to make clear, they mean polarization, and when talking polarization "false equivalence is no virtue."
That mismatch between parties and governing institutions is exacerbated by the fact that the polarization is asymmetric. Republicans have become a radical insurgency—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of their political opposition. The evidence of this asymmetry is overwhelming.
Here's one piece of the evidence: Ideology in House roll call votes since 1870. That blue line veering radically upward? That's Republicans.
How to fix that is the big problem, and it must be fixed if the country is to function again effectively for all but the wealthiest people who can buy policy. Seems to me the start of fixing it though, is fixing the Republican Party, and it sure does appear that Republicans are going to be handling that themselves. It's hard to see anyway around the need for the Republican Party as it currently exists in its extremism to be crushed, ground into dust from which it must be forced to reform. Which is a long-term project.
In the meantime, maybe the Democratic Senate could try to move that project along a bit, by reforming the filibuster once and for all and getting some shit done, thereby putting more pressure on the Republican House to stop being a national embarrassment. A girl can dream.