We have them because the Founders thought it was a good idea.
Then they thought it was a good idea to have two houses with different criteria, giving two chances to quash legislation. Plus the veto. Plus the Supreme Court (whose job they left almost completely undefined, so they made up a job description).
So we have them because we can't get rid of them. But they are practically useless. They can usually manage the bare minimum of reauthorizing the thing they said last year. Then they can rename a few post offices, have some grandstanding hearings, and then go home to campaign for reelection.
As Donald Trump and the Republicans have so aptly proven, all checks and balances depend on an elaborate system of conventions, manners and personal honor, and a general spirit of compliance. As soon as the electorate votes for a party and administration choosing to simply ignore all that, the system folds entirely.
That is also the core problem for reestablishing trust with the rest of the world: Even if a Democrat or just a sane Republican wins in 28 and tries to revert many of the destructive policies the current administration enacted, there is now solid evidence the much-hailed system of checks and balances doesn’t work as advertised. And that means there is not really a legitimate argument to trust the US as much as countries and businesses did, which calls a lot of things into question—the bond market, the petrodollar, investments in the USA, dependency on American services…
That’s the history of separation of powers, the judiciary is the final check in the loop. It doesn’t fully explain why Congress has allowed the expansion of executive power for nearly a century, resulting in more and more major issues being pushed to the Supreme Court.
That’s not to say states have lost power, their reach has also grown exponentially far outpacing even the federal in terms of number of workers and written law.
It’s mostly just Congress has become self satisfied on being negotiators for spending the most money in their own states, while ignoring the minimization of their role in the greater power dynamic.
Everyone makes a big deal about president as the signal but IMO if you take a 10,000-foot view of US history Congress neutering itself is the real long term narrative. Including most major current populist issues like immigration, debt, war, abortion, etc. They are hands off unless it involves new spending.
> It doesn’t fully explain why Congress has allowed the expansion of executive power for nearly a century, resulting in more and more major issues being pushed to the Supreme Court.
It's because the US is a presidential republic with no concept of a non-confidence vote. This makes the sitting head of the party ~impossible to remove, and when government fails to reach consensus, instead of... Having an election, and let the voters decide, power de-facto ends up in the hands of the executive.
I am not sure a vote of non-confidence would have helped here — there are only two parties.
> I am not sure a vote of non-confidence would have helped here — there are only two parties.
But why are there only two parties?
The rest of the Anglosphere–Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK–have multiparty systems–some are more multiparty than others, but none of them have the hard two-party system that the US has, in which third parties have a very marginal role (not completely marginal – e.g. in a close election, the decisions of New York's Conservative and Working Families parties can make a real difference to the outcome – but certainly at a national level third parties have no real power in the US.)
First-past-the-post is a popular explanation, but it can't by itself explain it, since the UK and Canada use it, yet lack a US-style hard two party system (and with the rise of the Reform party in the UK, the British system is becoming less two-party than it has been in a long time.)
Even if first-past-the-post could change, it's not the whole ballgame. To get on a state ballot you need thousands of petition signatures, and those signatures can be invalidated on technicalities brought up by major parties' legal teams. To be covered by the media or be included in a debate you need to poll at a high percentage. You can't get public funding to campaign unless you already had a high percentage of the vote in a previous election. Nobody will donate to you because the third party just detracts from the other two that will give the big donors what they want. And gerrymandering ensures the same people keep getting elected. All those roadblocks are in place because the two major parties put them there to prevent 3rd party challengers. The whole thing is rigged.
Just to show up and get 1% of the vote, you would need a grassroots national movement to elect someone who was wildly popular, who could build a 50-state network of volunteers (including legal, political, financial, community organizing, etc), sponsored by someone with extremely deep pockets that doesn't want anything from established political figures. And you'd still lose.
We have representatives already. The problem is we never hold their feet to the fire. We keep voting for the same useless bastards, and we don't vote them out when they do nothing. Half the country doesn't vote. That's our own responsibility we're shirking. Rather than get a new party, we need to get off our collective asses, and use the existing power we have to force the parties to do their jobs.
the lesson congress learned from the Hillary Clinton coronation getting derailed by Obama was to absolutely never ever vote on anything important
Can you elaborate what you mean?
Well, one should also remember that they thought protecting the opulent minority was so important that an entire house ought to represent them. Secure the permeant interests of the country and all that.
Not that the other house isn't also tilted that way, but it seems to be that they, and the appointments approved by them, are functioning exactly as was intended (as shown by the supreme court suddenly caring about executive overreach when it came to money). Who knows whether they would care about the social issues affecting the poors nowadays, but they certainly didn't care to let the people be in charge without a veto from that opulent minority.
They also thought owning slaves was a good idea. Perhaps we shouldn’t let men dead for centuries dictate how to run the country anymore?