As President Obama explained in a 2014 press conference, “people are going to ask for greater accountability and more responsibility from me than from anybody else in this town.”

Worse, the party that controls the White House tends to bear the blame for a dysfunctional Congress, even when the opposition party creates that dysfunction. Enacting significant legislation typically requires bipartisan cooperation, which means that either party can shut down progress simply by refusing to cooperate. The 2010s revealed that America’s constitutional system is profoundly broken.

(Hasen defines the term “override” broadly to include acts of Congress that “overturned, reversed, or modified a Supreme Court statutory interpretation holding.”)Īs Congress has become more dysfunctional, the Supreme Court’s ruling has increasingly become the final word in American governance. If you want to understand what the Supreme Court became in the past decade, consider a 2012 study by University of California Irvine law professor Rick Hasen.īetween 19, Hasen found that Congress enacted “an average of twelve overrides of Supreme Court cases in each two-year Congressional term.” Between 20, by contrast, the number of overrides dwindled to a mere 2.8 per two-year term.

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