906 in Truman's 'Do Nothing Congress', 176 in 2012

Those numbers are for laws passed by the respective Congresses: 1948 and 2012. Truman, who had been given little chance to win the 1948 election, because of the stalemate in Washington, made a nation-wide whistle-stop campaign (trains worked in those days, before the Interstate Highway system), successfully running against the "Do Nothing Congress."

That gives you an idea of how dysfunctional our national political system is today. Congress has been unable to pass major pieces of legislation, and has passed "stop-gap" measures just to "keep the lights on."

Obama is not to blame, and if he had a personality like Harry Truman, he could easily run against the "Do Nothing Congress" of today. Obama does make the point that Congress, specifically the Republicans in Congress, have played an obstructionist role.

The Republican House of Representatives has passed bills, but most of them were only statements of their agenda, with no expectation that the Senate's Democratic majority could accept them, and they haven't. The Democratic Senate, on the other hand has been stalemated by the Republican Senate minority's routine use of the "filibuster," rendering the 41 Republican Senators the controlling bloc, while the less unified and more diverse 59 Democrats (including two independents) have been unable to advance even a portion of their agenda.

A few Republicans have attempted to compromise with Democrats, to bring something workable to the floor, but, like Senator Lugar, they have been defeated in their party primaries, defeated by the accusation of "Republicans in Name Only," or RINO's. No Democrats have lost primaries for similar reasons.

Long ago, when I taught Political Science in Florida, a colleague exclaimed he'd just proven, beyond a doubt, that Democrats and Republicans in Congress voted more frequently along party lines than they did with the other party! In those days (the 1970's), this was a fairly significant finding, because Democrats and Republicans did what is now unthinkable: they worked together on important pieces of legislation. Votes were often not along party lines. Now, among Republicans, it is almost unthinkable for them to vote for any policy proposed by Democrats, even if many, like Obamacare, were originally proposed by Republicans. Democrats break ranks more often, but much more rarely than in the 1970's.

Today we have a Congress that is probably as stalemated as the Congresses that preceded the Civil War. The Republican Senate minority has been open about what they intend: to do anything possible to prevent Obama's re-election, even if that drives us back into the Great Recession and immiserates their constituents. They can always blame everything on the Democrats.

Rome's Senate in the fifth century was even less functional: the Emperors, meaning, their advisors, and Senators as office-holders, made the only meaningful decisions--usually for their own self-interest.