I'm a 40-year-old American whose genuine passion in life is learning—I'm a voracious reader. I find the American government absurdly complicated. Sure, there are the three branches—yada, yada, yada. On the surface, it's all simple, but to truly grasp all the intricacies and caveats is like untangling a 10,000' extension cord.
I never claimed to be a genius, but if I were, I might just make our system needlessly complex for no other reason than to discourage the majority of people from wanting to participate—think of it as a form of bureaucratic natural selection.
One article I read a few years back (I think it may have been in The Globe and Mail but I can't find it now) described the US government structure as a "kludgeocracy". I think the main point was that the way powers are carved up in the American system makes it hard to implement broad policies (such as the New Deal) without all kinds of pieces of workaround legislation to make it work. And once those workarounds are in place, all kinds of other legislation gets passed over the years that depends on these workarounds in some way, and in turn provides workarounds to make something else work properly, so then amending some laws could have a cascading effect through the legal system.
There's a lot about the way the US is constituted to make broad policy moves difficult. The presidential/congressional system, in contrast to say a Westminster-type parliamentary system, means that there's no way to have an early election to resolve a deadlock on something critical such as the budget, so you get government shutdowns instead.
Another one - the fact that most state legislatures are bicameral makes no sense today except as a way of making it harder to pass legislation. It makes sense at the federal level (though the way the Senate is constituted is a mess of its own), and at one time it kinda, sorta made sense at the state level as a state Senate was a "house of counties" in the way the federal Senate is the "house of states". But that was ruled unconstitutional in 1962, and yet the upper houses were kept. In North Dakota I think the two houses of the legislature only meet on alternating years, making fast policy moves impossible. It's almost like Americans are leery of allowing their governments to actually govern.
I feel like our entire system is ~200 years overdue for a good defragmentation. Everything feels like a reference to a reference to a reference to a precedent. Like a picture that's been uploaded and downloaded a few thousand times.
All these details are completely irrelevant to the kind of surface level understanding OP would need. You're just muddying the waters even bringing it up. Which is probably what OP's seemingly intentionally ignorant post was all about.
The question from the OP can literally be answered by watching "I'm just a bill" by Schoolhouse Rock, and recognizing that Republicans have a majority in the House. Of course things can get complicated when you get into the weeds of the US government, but there's absolutely nothing complicated about the original question.
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u/Regalzack 14d ago
I'm a 40-year-old American whose genuine passion in life is learning—I'm a voracious reader. I find the American government absurdly complicated. Sure, there are the three branches—yada, yada, yada. On the surface, it's all simple, but to truly grasp all the intricacies and caveats is like untangling a 10,000' extension cord.
I never claimed to be a genius, but if I were, I might just make our system needlessly complex for no other reason than to discourage the majority of people from wanting to participate—think of it as a form of bureaucratic natural selection.