This morning, David Brooks writes, “The great paradox of the age is that Barack Obama, the most riveting of recent presidents, is leading us into an era of Congressional dominance. And Congressional governance is a haven for special interest pleading and venal logrolling. When the executive branch is dominant you often get coherent proposals that may not pass. When Congress is dominant, as now, you get politically viable mishmashes that don’t necessarily make sense.”

Back in 2005, Norman Ornstein co-wrote The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track with Thomas E. Mann, concluding, “The arrival of unified Republican government in 2001 transformed the aggressive and active GOP-led Congress of the Clinton years into a deferential and supine body, one extremely reluctant to demand information, scrub presidential proposals, or oversee the executive.”

This morning, I asked Ornstein what he thought of how Congress was working today, and whether it’s broken, fixed, or now shattered.

“The answer to the question is a mixed bag,” he responded. “In the House, we see too many closed or structured rules, not enough fealty to the ‘regular order.’ We’ve seen too many major bills brought out without the time, whether 24 or 72 hours, for members and the rest of us to read them and know what is in them. Much of this is the responsibility of the majority. But there is not yet any opening from the minority to take away the excuses from the majority. A case in point is the attempt to ’slow walk’ the dozen appropriations bills by offering hundreds of amendments. In most cases, these amendments aren’t designed to offer alternatives or reshape the substance, but just to keep the majority from getting the bills through on time. On motions to recommit, we’ve seen too many ‘gotcha’ amendments instead of real minority alternatives. Still, the onus is on the majority to create openness and fairness.

“David is right that the legislative process is messy and the outcomes driven as much or more by the need to get something passed as the need to produce something coherent and constructive. But I side with the administration on the strategy — the goal in the first instance is to get something through. Some of the problems of coherence and constructiveness can be ameliorated in conference committees. And some can be adjusted by executive action. But you play with the hand you are dealt, and that means you have to operate within a political process that makes any legislative action difficult, more so now because of the continuing partisan dysfunction and ideological polarization.”