Thanks for the engagement Dave! You raise a good point. In our current environment of gridlock, the executive branch ends up getting the most stuff done. Ideally Congressional leaders could break logjams, but you’re right that right now this is one advantage of the presidency.

Still, I believe that the presidency helped put us in this position of gridlock in the first place. The GOP / Tea Party takeover was centered around opposition to Obama. From 2016 to 2020, the unifying force among Democrats (liberals and moderates) was to defeat Donald Trump and his enablers. We end up with negative partisanship, in which most people’s chief motivation for voting is to defeat the other party’s presidential candidate. The presidency is so powerful and so central in our media that a divisive person winds up dividing the whole political system.