>>paxys+Z1
In general "checks and balances" never work particularly well. Very few presidential democracies last more than 50 years. Once you have two branches of government that can both claim a democratic mandate but have different ideologies in a conflict you get a cycle of constitutional hardball then eventually one says "I have a democratic mandate to do this and you can't stop me" and the system fails. The US managed to avoid this for so long first, because of the good example of George Washinton in establishing norms to start with. Then we had parties that were highly partisan but non-ideological and mostly fighting over graft until the progressive era. Well, there was the brief era of ideological polarization between the Democrats and Republicans around the 1860 election but we all know how that turned out. From the progressive era through Nixon's "southern strategy" we had an era of unusually low partisanship with ideologically mixed parties. But since then the parties have been diverging and nowadays all the conservatives are in the Republican party and all the liberals are in the Democrat party. And hardball tactics like filibustering all the opposing bills in the senate has started.
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Filibust...
We're in a pretty bad place and I'm not sure how we get out of it.
