How in the Hell Did the Senate Get So Screwed Up

and fail to pass anything of substance?

Blame the silly rules regarding cloture and filibustering.

Now NOTHING gets passed in Congress unless 3/5 of a majority in the Senate approves it instead of a simple majority, the way it is supposed to be. The GOP can literally hijack any kind of bill while not being in the majority.

From Fallows:

Again, this is a very well-explored issue in the academic literature and much of the blog world. For blog and magazine discussions, see here, here, here, here, and here. An authoritative academic treatment came from David Mayhew, of Yale, in his 2002 James Madison lecture for the American Political Science Association. It is available here in PDF and very much worth reading. Sample passage:
"That topic is supermajority rule in the U.S. Senate-- that is, the need to win more than a simple majority of senators to pass laws. Great checker and balancer though Madison was, this feature of American institutional life would probably have surprised him and might have distressed him....

"Automatic failure for bills not reaching the 60 mark. That is the current Senate practice, and in my view it has aroused surprisingly little interest or concern among the public or even in political science. It is treated as matter- of-fact. One might ask: What ever happened to the value of majority rule?

Everything I have mentioned here is familiar, including the fact that this newly-invented "check" was not part of the original check-and-balance constitutional design. But somehow it isn't familiar, in the sense of being part of general understanding and mainstream coverage of issues like the health reform bill. Talk shows analyze exactly how the Administration can get to 60 votes; they don't discuss where the 60-vote practice came from and what it has done to public life. I have a gigantic article coming out soon in the Atlantic -- long even by our standards! but interesting! -- which concerns America's ability to address big public problems, compared in particular with China's. The increasing dysfunction of public institutions, notably the Senate, is a big part of this story.