> The fundamental idea is that the American system is created to represent the will of the republic across time and space:

> - Every bill needs to be passed by all three House, Senate and the President

> - House recycles very fast (every 2 years)

> - President recycles at a moderate speed (every 4 years)

> - Senate recycles at a slow pace (every 6 years, and partially every 2 years)

> - House represents the population

> - Senate represents all states equally (or represents land)

> - Presidency is elected through a hybrid system (electoral college, which is distributed in proportion to the population).

I feel like a lot of people fail to consider whether this is a good thing. Like social studies classes always present this as an unvarnished good - "checks and balances, the bedrock of our system". But a system really should be designed to build consensus to action - there should always be someone in the driver's seat, even if it's not someone I agree with. Letting the rudder flap in the breeze until 100% of people can agree on something is not an inherently desirable outcome, because that almost never happens!

And yes, some people would say that's a good thing too, that we should bias towards doing nothing instead of doing something, but... that's not really a viable model indefinitely. The world is now based around exponential growth in economic output, exponential growth in technology, and we are preferring political systems optimized for an O(1) constant-state world where there's 100 years between the cotton gin and the internal combustion engine.

Especially in times of crisis that bias towards doing nothing is a really bad thing... consider the case of the Polish Sejm and how the goal of "excessive consensus" basically crippled the country and allowed their enemies to manipulate the system to create disruption and then exploit the deadlock for political gain.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Poland/The-17th-century-cri...

Everyone agrees 100% isn't the right number, but then, what is? is 75% the right number? 60%? Simple majority? How big a consensus has ever existed in the modern political sphere, short of 9/11-style world-changing events? A 60% popular vote is considered a landslide, but if the system requires a 75% popular vote to achieve a 60% senatorial/house majority, the number is effectively 75% and actually achieving consensus really isn't possible in that system.

The American system's focus on checks-and-balances really is excessive - it's not a good thing for a system to be unable to reach consensus. It worked for a while as long as the "gentleman's agreement" held but now we are seeing people exercising political maximalism, "hardball" so to speak, and with those participants the actual rules of the system no longer result in consensus

We can then optimize around the "what if we flop back and forth between parties" problem separately but - requiring 100% consensus between all dimensionalities of society to do anything is not really the solution for that.

This idea that "deadlock between branches is a positive design goal" is fundamentally not how the rest of the world approaches this. After all, in parliamentary systems the PM is the leader of the party/coalition that controls parliament. That's a good system, it builds a government that has a consensus towards action and goals! Producing deadlock between branches of government isn't a desirable outcome in itself. And that, if you phrase it as such, is an inherent rejection of the American ideal of "checks and balances" in the sense you outline it here ("to require massive consensus across all dimensionalities of society via multiple branches and political compartments each favoring a dimensionality"). Yes, absolutely they still have a constitution and judicial branch to protect people, but they don't design the system around deadlocks between arms of the government being a design goal. And it still doesn't lead to "laws completely flip every time power changes" or the other supposedly negative outcomes from consensus-oriented systems.