> which is the primary problem we now face I am actually really, really confused as to why you think that. That's not at all what the past several years have s

> which is the primary problem we now face I am actually really, really confused as to why you think that. That's not at all what the past several years have shown - we've seen over and again again individual Senators (who have more power, of course) and small blocks of Representatives hold things up over and over and over again. It's simply not practically possible to primary most Reps in their own districts because the primary problem isn't money, is that their constituents really do support them and not some nameless figure propped up by national campaign spending. For a party primary, the most important thing is far from getting some sort of national political support. That is not even remotely on the radar. It's garnering the support of the local party (people who actually live there and run the local outlet), local "elites" (politically involved business people, city and county pols, etc), and being someone known in your community - not through ads, but because you've lived there and done something. There are exceptions but this is definitely the rule. Of course, it's also the case that people often overstate the influence of money in the first place. It's votes that decide the election, not dollars. You can't buy your way into electing somebody that nobody wants to vote for. You can only try to persuade them and encourage them. > As for the second, I think it is rather clear from history of the early presidency that the Presidency was not trusted nor viewed as being equal to Congress in terms of power. On the contrary, it is quite clear from the Constitutional Convention that one of their greatest fears was making the executive in any way dependent on the legislative, and the first several Presidents took a very expansive view of Presidential power - the accusation that Adams wanted to be a king was not just wild slander. Of course it is difficult to compare modern times with the past, to some degree - the reach of government in the 1900s increased by orders of magnitude, and the APA in 46 created a sort of shadow Constitution, so the field where people could even imagine the President ordering anything changed.