Well, things used to function (somewhat) because various uncodified norms were observed; that a Speaker of one party would cooperate with a President of the other, that a Senate minority would not filibuster every bill possible (only civil rights bills, alas), and that in general politicians would work to govern rather than to make the country ungovernable. They are no longer observed.
(Dannii, that’s a joke, but it also wouldn’t work for a bunch of reasons. For one thing, no one cares that much about gerrymandering, or at least the people who would care are going to get outvoted, by design. And the people in charge have no shame. Some truly ridiculous schemes may have gotten quashed, like GOP schemes to rig the electoral college by dividing up the votes of states that Democrats tend to win, but garden-variety gerrymanders have gone completely unpunished, and even extraordinary gerrymanders like the Texas mid-decade redistricting have gone unpunished. Also, the idea of equal-area districts is a nightmare; how would you draw equal-area districts in New York, which has more than half its population in one incredibly dense city?)
As an addendum, here’s an article noting that the Republicans have just changed the rules of the House (real binding rules, which as ChrisC points out the Hastert rule wasn’t) so that only the majority leadership can call for a vote on a bill even when the Senate has approved that bill. Until now any member of the House could move to vote on a Senate bill, but Republican leadership knew that if Democrats could force such a vote they would attract enough Republicans to pass a bill that kept the government open with no conditions.
As the congressional scholars quoted in the article say, this is an unprecedented power grab, but when a chamber of the legislature sets its own rules by majority vote there’s no legal way of preventing that.
Gerrymandering is part of the problem here, but only part. Because so many Democratic votes are in cities where virtually no Republicans live, any even vaguely rational district-drawing will give you a lot of districts with virtually all Democrats. (Rural areas are Republican-dominated, but not nearly to the same extent.) In other words, Democrats wasting a lot of votes is mostly baked into the cake, if you will, given where the votes are nowadays. See: nymag.com/news/features/republic … 3-2/#print
The leadership in both houses has essentially total power over what comes to the floor. (As Matt W. says, there was, until recently, a rule allowing House members to force a vote on a Senate bill, but it was obscure enough that few even realized it existed.) See: talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/the-hou … a-shutdown
There are Republicans–how many is a murky question; the count I’ve seen is 20-30–who are willing to claim they support clean CRs to reopen the government, but said Republicans lack the guts to actually take such a vote, or support a discharge petition forcing such a vote. (I.e., they’re unwilling to defy the Republican leadership.) That they’re even claiming to support a clean CR suggests that they’re getting a lot of heat from their constituents for shutting down the government. How this will play in the next election for those Republicans is a somewhat interesting question. Note that the present state of play–the leadership brings nothing to the floor, the Republicans in question get to talk a good game about wanting to reopen the government while doing nothing about it–allows them to play it both ways; a discharge petition, if it ever gets voted on, would at least make the choice somewhat more explicit, though it’s a pretty arcane bit of procedure and it’s hard to see it becoming the subject of an opponent’s campaign.
In recent years, a whole bunch of relatively conservative Republicans who have occasionally cooperated with Democrats have been defeated in primaries by more conservative Republicans who regard cooperation with Democrats as anathema. The track record of the more conservative Republicans in the general elections has been mixed, at best, particularly in the Senate. (Indeed, the Senate might be in Republican hands today absent these primary challenges.) Nevertheless, these challenges, the prominence of right-wing billionaires happy to fund them, and the near-total breakdown of campaign finance restrictions that might inhibit right-wing billionaires from throwing money into these challenges, tend to teach Republicans the lesson that cooperating with Democrats costs you your seat. This dynamic is far rarer on the left; for one thing, there are fewer left-wing billionaires who spend all their time obsessing over politics. But if you’re looking for a reason why Republicans are so intransigent, you have to factor this in.
