Right, democrats were ALWAYS looking for compromise. Hell, democrats have to compromise with their own party!

If you doubt me, simply go read votes from the past 20 years, and compare it with say 1960-1980. Republicans do not cross the aisle anymore.

The interesting part is that at some point republicans had so propagandized their voters against the very concept of governance that "Elect me to office for the next 6 years and I promise nothing will get done" was a decades long strategy that worked! The more republicans obstructed, including preventing republican voters from getting things they claim to want, the more republicans got voted in. For decades now, republicans that compromise with democrats have been primaried by less collaborative republicans.

Imagine a judge getting elected for insisting they will never hear another case!

None of this should be controversial, republican politicians have literally stated this as their goal and promise.

I recently watched a 2 hour congressional committee session, with 5 minute talking points per member. BOTH sides of the aisle used their entire 5 minutes to spout one-sided rhetoric and talking points obviously designed for re-election rather than anything resembling debate or conversation.

I have no idea which side "started it", but where we've landed isn't useful.

Yes, and the filibuster.

The causes are more complicated.

The founding fathers envisioned the legislature be slow and deliberate, so it was never intended to move quickly.

One major party doesn’t think government solves any problems, so it’s not incentivized to use it to solve any problems. In fact, a generation of Republicans have tried to stifle fixing any of the large problems.

The other party is frequently torn between a wide spectrum of “do everything for citizens in a wide swath of policy areas” and “neoliberal free market capitalism”, so they can’t even agree when they are in majority how to weird their political capital.

The rest is usually downstream of sound-byte media (stripping out nuance and polarization of media outlets), paid advertising scaremongering voters (money in politics), and electoral engineering like gerrymandering (legislators picking voters instead of the inverse).

No, it's the lack of representation. We're an extreme outlier among OECD countries, worst representation in the free world. Even Communist China has better representation. The U.S. in the 1790s had representation in line with Nordic countries today.

The only change needed is repealing the Apportionment Act of 1929.