The institutions of democracy are dedicated to the status quo:

Congress has created rules that require herculean effort to make easy choices -- say, confirmation of officials -- and render meaningful change impossible. The filibuster rule assures stalemate in the Senate. Committee rules make it almost impossible to bring a new proposal to the floor of the House. Bright new people get elected and find themselves suffocated and powerless.

The Executive Branch operates in a dense jungle of accumulated law. The president can't approve a new power line or wind farm without a decade or so of environmental review. The president can't even appoint a committee to clean out the legal jungle without complying with the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which is so laden with conditions on membership and public process that a meaningful recommendation is almost impossible. The Simpson-Bowles proposal, for example, didn't have a chance of approval by the appointed committee, so Simpson and Bowles just took it upon themselves to present their own proposal.

Special interests are not prsincipals but agents, motivated not to solve problems but to "work them." Actually solving a problem would eliminate their jobs. An entire industry is built around the conflict between "pro-life" and "pro-choice" factions. The more polarization, the better off both sides are. The political parties each fill their campaign coffers by milking this conflict for all it's worth. Even if some pure-minded lobbyist wanted to solve a problem, the dynamics of special-interest groups would keep driving positions toward the lowest common denominator. Senior environmentalists have told me that it would be desirable to radically streamline environmental review to enable rebuilding of our country's power grid, but they could never join with industry to support such a speedy process, because their "base" would think they were selling out.

Democracy's goals have changed. Government is played as a game, not as a fiduciary responsibility to get things done. Running the country is not what political leaders mainly think about. They wake up every morning calculating how to beat the other party. You think this is too cynical? Hearings for completely unobjectionable judicial candidates are held up for years because of unrelated partisan bickering. A chief of staff for a Democratic senator once told me that a bill that perfectly reflected Democratic policy was rejected because it was introduced by a moderate Republican.Insiders don't even pretend to be motivated by doing what's right. A few years ago, trying to solve the country's medical malpractice problem, I helped organize a large group of consumer groups, patient advocates, and health-care providers behind the idea of creating special health courts. The proposal enjoyed almost unanimous support from legitimate health-care constituencies, as well as broad editorial support. Polls showed that the public strongly supported it. We had bipartisan sponsors in both houses of Congress. All we needed was a pilot project to see how it would work. Who could object to that? Here is what I was told:

A leader of the Democratic caucus in the House said he understood why this was such a good idea. Then he asked, "How do the trial lawyers feel about it?" They hate it, I answered, because they feed off the unreliability of the current system, which consumes almost 60 percent of awards in lawyers' fees and administrative costs. "Then we can't support it," he replied. But whom do they represent, I asked -- AARP and leading patient groups are on our side. "It doesn't matter," he said frankly. "The trial lawyers give us the money."

I went to the White House and made my pitch about how great it would be for President George W. Bush to stand on the lawn with consumer groups and propose a legal reform that would actually be better for patients who were injured by mistakes, as well as for doctors unfairly accused. The senior staffer with whom I was talking understood the virtues of the proposal. But, he said in somewhat guarded language, "It's better for us to propose traditional tort reform capping damages." But that doesn't solve the problem of defensive medicine, I argued. "I understand that," he acknowledged, "but we benefit that way." What are the odds of traditional tort reform passing? I asked. "Oh, about one in 100," he answered. A junior staffer had to translate what was happening: The White House wanted to propose a reform it knew would fail so that Republicans could blame the Democrats for not solving the problem.