Congress is in a bad way these days. Just about everyone on the political spectrum agrees on that, even if they don’t all have the same grievances. With so little getting accomplished on Capitol Hill and so many powers ceded to the executive and the judiciary, Congress has devolved into the world’s biggest greenroom, a place where people just bide their time waiting for their next television appearance.
Hardly anything gets passed as legislation anymore. That is partly the one-two punch of ideological polarization (in which the parties are further apart and have less common ground to start with) and the Senate filibuster (which has made it impossible, except for a few months for the Democrats in 2009, for either party to pass new laws on a party-line vote). Those tendencies have been exacerbated by the paranoid populist style of arguing that any bipartisan cooperation is a sign that the people doing the cooperating are conspiring against their own voting base.
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