In response to complaints by President Clinton over the U.S. Congress's reluctance to swiftly enact this or that agenda, Bob Dole once said, "One man's gridlock is another man's checks and balances." The peculiar genius of the American federal system of legislation (laws must be passed by two separate legislative houses [and generally, each law must first be vetted by at least one committee in each of said legislative houses], then approved by the president) is its inefficiency: it's blastedly difficult to get much of anything over all those hurdles. This is a perverse, but remarkably brilliant, defense against bad laws.
Another, more noble view is that all those mechanisms allow for legislative wisdom to be applied through a process of careful deliberation. At the First Things website, M. Anthony Mills uses a profile of Nebraska senator Benjamin Sasse to discuss the political utility, and genuine conservatism, of legislative deliberation.
The Republic may be restored yet.
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