Atlantic Council Senior Adviser Harlan Ullman writes for the Huffington Post on gridlock in Congress:
In this corner, wearing black trunks and weighing in at 175 pounds is the president of the United States. In that corner, weighing collectively 101,101 pounds and wearing even darker trunks are the 535 members of the U.S. Congress. When the bell rings, please do something.
This six-year fight has had only one result so far—broken government. But this state of failed government did not happen over night. The current disintegration of government is akin to a disease that took years to metastasize. The potentially fatal flaws lay in the Constitution and divided government based on separation of powers in which not one word is mentioned about political parties. To be sure, the United States almost came irreversibly apart in 1861 over states’ rights and slavery.