The Senate hasn't gotten more dysfunctional. It's gotten more *visible* about its dysfunction

Most people think the problem is recent—that some combination of polarization, cable news, or social media broke an institution that used to work. But the Senate's fundamental constraint is older than the internet. You have 100 people with equal power and no strong internal hierarchy, which means gridlock isn't a bug, it's the design. The filibuster alone guarantees that nothing moves without supermajority consensus (or until someone changes the rule, which then creates its own crisis). That structure was *intended* to slow things down. It did that in 1965 just as much as it does now. What changed is transparency and speed of information. You used to have maybe two or three senators publicly grandstanding on any given issue. Reporters covered the institution through select committee hearings and the occasional floor speech. Regular people had low-resolution views of what was actually happening. Now there's a C-SPAN feed, Twitter threads, newsletters—everyone sees every negotiation falling apart in real time. That's not new dysfunction; that's old dysfunction with perfect visibility. It *feels* worse because you're watching the mechanism grind rather than just reading the outcome in the paper the next day. The risk is thinking the solution is "make it work better" when the actual question is whether the Senate's constraints are still fit for what we're asking it to do. That's a separate problem entirely.