So who was to blame for those Reagan-era deficits? Because of divided government, both Congress and the President were to blame. But since both were responsible and controlled by different parties, neither could be held accountable.
If our legislative and executive branches were combined as they are in most Western democracies, then responsibility would be easy to figure out. The party in power is responsible; therefore, the voters would hold them accountable at the polls. In short, our Constitution bequeaths us a government that by design is unaccountable, but that's not all.
Our much-vaunted Constitution is just plain undemocratic. Consider the U.S. Senate, the least representative governing body in the Western world. Having two senators per state is an outrage. In the Senate, a bit more than half a million Wyomingites have the same amount of representation as 37 million Californians. As Alexander Hamilton put it in 1787, "the practice of parsing out two senators per state shocks too much the ideas of justice and every human feeling." And he said that when the ratio between the most populous state and the least was near 10-to-1, not the obscene 66-to-1 that it is now.
Little wonder that the Senate, with its overuse of the threat of filibuster that allows 41 Senators from sparsely populated states that represent a small fraction of the electorate, has become the tar pits of the Congress, the place where bills go to die. But year after year we put up with the patented absurdities of an unrepresentative Senate and an equally unrepresentative Electoral College.
All because they were put in the "sacred" Constitution by the framers who in 1787 undoubtedly knew, because they were so foresighted, that we would some day end up with an African-American President, who in their day would have been counted as three-fifths of a human being, and, also, I'm sure they knew that the Packers would beat the Steelers in Super Bowl XLV. It's just too bad they didn't have on-line betting in the 18th century, or the framers could've made a fortune.
What we need to understand in this country is that a constitution is only a plan of government. There is nothing sacred about it. "The legitimacy of the constitution," Dahl pointed out, "ought to derive solely from its utility as an instrument of democratic government -- nothing more, nothing less."
But our country is truly cursed by a constitutional idolatry. In most modern democracies, if the governing institutions don't work, they're fixed. But here in a land of so much change and innovation, God forbid we should make our government better. What would the long-dead framers think? So we are stuck in a pre-modern constitutional fundamentalism.
We cannot amend our Constitution and make it more democratic. And we cannot get corporate money out of our elections because we have an activist Supreme Court that believes it can channel the thoughts of the framers -- as if the framers even had opinions about the "personhood" of transnational corporations. And if we can do neither of those, then the odds of any real change happening are not worth betting on.
I'm afraid our government is like Elmer Fudd; it has done to itself the old gag from vintage cartoons. It's painted itself into a corner, and I have no idea how, or even, if our government will ever get out of this corner. We have serious problems that need to be resolved and can be resolved, but the very nature of our system prevents workable solutions from even being tried. In short, because our system is so totally broken, we cannot fix our system.
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