alt Hacker News> the legislative gridlock and dysfunction in the house of representatives and senate has made them completely incapable of governing -- the least productive in a generation.
They governed well enough until January 20.
> This is opened up an opportunity for a well funded strongman, and the checks and balances that were intended to protect our democracy are now mere suggestions.
Creating gridlock and dysfunction is an intentional (and well-known) strategy to create a strongman. Most of the gridlock and dysfunction are on one side. You can call that partisan but even they oppose even the most simple, inescable issues such as paying debt. Back under Obama, the GOP in Congress openly said that their goal was to make government a failure under Obama.
This is the thing that drives me nuts, especially when someone smugly trots out the "Democrats and Republicans are the same" nonsense.
Even when Republicans are in power, Democrats don't resort to blatantly obstructionist measures to mess with a Republican administration.
Democrats don't refuse to consider judicial nominations because "it's a presidential election year", and then hypocritically rush through a SCOTUS appointment right at the end of a presidential term.
Sure, they do things like vote down a debt ceiling increase when it's paired with some completely unrelated legislation that they don't agree with. But when the power balance is reversed, Republicans will vote down a debt ceiling increase if it's not paired with some completely unrelated legislation that they want.
(I wish there was something in the constitution that required that each bit of legislation be single-topic. Certainly that would still be open to interpretation. But I think at the very least it would eliminate the more obvious examples of abusive brinkmanship.)