>Seriously, name 1 check/balance that's actually particularly good!
The person in charge with executing the law is different from the people in charge of crafting the laws to be executed.
The person in charge with executing the law is different from the people in charge of crafting the laws to be executed.
The real protection here is that a simple majority can't throw out the minorities voice entirely. But that doesn't require the separation of the executive to achieve, it merely requires either a supermajority, and/or a differently composed senate (which doesn't need to be unrepresentative either, the differing election schedule would suffice, and it doesn't even need a veto - an election-cycle delay would be enough).
Incidentally, from memory, all sliding-into-dictatorship democracies I can think of did so behind a strong "executive". Empirically at least that would suggest that simply not having such a strong executive sounds like a sound protection against despotism. Intuitively, that would suggest that it's pretty hard to rally a country behind a dictatorship that originates in congress; a powerful figurehead matters. Finally, I'm not really sure to what extent a constitution really can or should protect against popular despotism - at best it can delay the process; but part of the point of democracy is self-rule; and taking away that rule to avoid despotism also takes it away for other reform - and it's not really going to work anyhow, because if enough people want to dump the laws, they will, even if the letter of the law begs to differ.
Article II Section 1 of the Constitution?
All it will take is a stronger, more popular leader who feels 'bypassing the rules' is ok for 'the greater good' (aka themselves), and we're in deep trouble.
If Trump hadn't spent all 4 years of his tenure actively disparaging, impugning, maligning, and throwing under the bus every military leader or hero he ran across, we could be in a very, very different country today. I'm still amazed how close he came to winning Arizona considering what he said and did to McCain.
Deadlock is not the worst thing, and the solution to it is not necessarily to remove as many locks as possible.
The actual problem in the US right now is that checks and balances are strong enough to allow one party to block things, but not strong enough to deter waiting until your party stochastically has enough power to get things done. This is exacerbated by having one party's ideologically committed to having the government do less.
In previous decades, stuff like earmarks greased the wheels enough to get things done (but an effective PR campaign against them got them banned). You could also fix deadlocks by strengthening the checks to force compromise among factions, like by coupling automatically expiring legislation with requirements for big super-majorities.
Since Congress makes its own rules, and 51/49 is enough to change a rule ('the nuclear option'), supermajority would have to be a constitutional amendment... And then 45% would be enough to halt government. I guarantee you this would then happen regularly.
Other systems have mechanisms to force elections if deadlocks are persistent. Of course, you also need mandatory voting, PTO for voting, full franchise, etc and that isn't going to happen in America while this Supreme Court lasts.
That was the problem with the Senate's supermajoriy requirements: basically the only thing holding them in place was convention, so they fall in the face of someone willing and able to make unsentimental tactical power plays.
IMHO, someone like McConnell would have behaved very differently if he knew his opponents could block him just as easily as he has blocked them. His apparent effectiveness is almost entirely a result of his greater willingness to hypocritically use then discard convention when it gets in his way. He'd never have gotten his tax cuts or judges if he wasn't able to bend the rules.
> Other systems have mechanisms to force elections if deadlocks are persistent.
I think something like that could be a genuine improvement.