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My ballpark estimate: In the recently concluded midterm campaign season, Democrats ran roughly eleventy-bajillion ads accusing Republican officeholders of voting — 98%, 99% or 100% of the time — “with Donald Trump.”

Calling your opponent a “rubber stamp” is a smart tactic when the president is historically unpopular, as President Trump is.

But there’s a hitch. When Joe Biden and Barack Obama were president, GOP challengers successfully made the same charge against Democratic incumbents. And, when the White House was controlled by one party and Congress another, the ads’ charges would claim that Candidate Smith voted with Nancy Pelosi 100% of the time or Candidate Jones voted with Kevin McCarthy 100% of the time.

And with very few exceptions, they were right, too.

That’s because Congress is broken. And its brokenness is spiderwebbing out into our politics like a cracked windshield. Congress was not designed to be a parliament where parties vote in lockstep with their party leader in the White House. But that’s how it’s worked for decades.

Starting in the 1970s, Congress was quietly revolutionized from within. It was all done in the name of “reform,” but the better word is “deform.”

Young Democrats began the process by seeking to wrest power from the barons who ran all-powerful committees. Because the barons rose up through the seniority system, they tended to be older and more conservative than the new crop of Watergate babies and other progressives. The reformers wanted to empower rank-and-file members. What they got was a process that encouraged the centralization of power in........

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