In our system of government, an opposition party doesn’t have the ability to pass legislation, but it has the ability to massively screw things up. It would be strange if legislators didn’t exercise that power in order to maximize their chances of either winning legislative concessions or hurting the current ruling party politically. Furthermore, our electoral system means that most House members are insulated from national attitudes about their actions, and, indeed, many Republicans members would be punished by their constituents — especially the ones who vote in primaries, the only elections that matter in many House districts — if they didn’t exercise their power to screw things up.

The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza referred recently to a House “suicide caucus,” a group of 80 Republicans driving the House further to the right, in defiance of national popular opinion and the wishes of the more “moderate” elements of their own party:

These eighty members represent just eighteen per cent of the House and just a third of the two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans. They were elected with fourteen and a half million of the hundred and eighteen million votes cast in House elections last November, or twelve per cent of the total. In all, they represent fifty-eight million constituents. That may sound like a lot, but it’s just eighteen per cent of the population.

These people represent very white, very conservative districts. Partisan primaries and first-past-the-post voting provide even more incentive to be as far to the right as possible. How much can we blame this “minority of a minority” for acting according to the probable wishes of their constituents? Shouldn’t we actually be more upset about a system of government that gives 80 people representing 18 percent of the population the ability to drag the United States to the edge of national default?

We’re a year out from an election that, in a parliamentary democracy, would’ve easily granted one party control of the government. If, in this hypothetical American parliamentary system, the opposition wanted to force a showdown over the budget a year after the election, we’d have another election, and the winning party would get to implement its agenda. Instead, we’re getting the sort of “compromise” American politics specializes in: the one where things are intentionally made worse for most people in the hopes that if things are made bad enough the other side will cave.

This is happening because our wise and noble founders devised a purposefully undemocratic federal government, in part because not many of them were particularly fond of the notion of democracy and in part because the ones who were at least a bit pro-democracy were forced to compromise with vile slave interests. We’ve since declared these creaky compromises to be evidence of political genius — an elegant separation of powers! checks and balances! — but the nearly 100 percent failure rate for other countries with true “Presidential systems” is a hint that it’s a mess. Meanwhile, our Constitution’s international influence has plummeted in recent decades. Its single best feature — the Bill of Rights — now looks stingy compared to the lists of positive enumerated rights in other nations’ constitutions.