The US political system isn't code, it's rich vs. poor. It only pretended to be "democratic" and "moral" for 250 years because the propaganda and triumphalism held more or less, but now it's reduced to a depraved, tin pot dictatorship because of slowly increased corruption due to uncorrected weaknesses even Kurt Gödel identified that were never addressed because the rich/powerful benefited from them.
It's also wishful thinking to suppose a corrupt, weak Congress would ever do anything to limit their own corruption. John McCain discovered there was zero appetite for reform.
It would take the sustained, coordinated efforts of many ~millions of people to peacefully* overthrow and reform a system which is entirely corrupt and unwilling to work for anyone not rich/powerful. Instead, at present, American voters are far too uninformed, uneducated, divided-and-conquered and/or demoralized in red/blue team bullshit factions to clearly characterize the situation they are in and the most correct response(s) to it. There will be no "progressive resurgence" through political means, but there could be corporate James Carville->Ezra Klein pseudo-progressive swing to the pretend, corporate left fronted by another wife cheater, Republican Lite (tm) like Gavin Newsom. Nothing will change.
* Those with the power will abuse it and direct illegality towards their enemies just like every dictator does. The hope is that extreme, excessive measures taken against peaceful people weakens their pillars of support. It doesn't always as in the cases of the Bonus Army, Occupy, or about 90% of peasant uprisings. Viet Nam and Gaza Hostage protests similarly also weren't effective enough.
i make a code analogy because i believe the US was intended as a country of ideas and laws and systems, as opposed to the legacy of arbitrary ruling classes and colonial extraction that it separated itself from. pessimistically one might worry there is simply no system of governance that can scale to this size population and still espouse the stated core values. optimistically one hopes that we could be just a few amendments away from a more perfect union that takes into account technology and mechanisms of communication like x/twitter etc that can allow a single person with access to sufficiently large capital reserves to interpose themselves between the people and their elected representatives.
That was the marketing on the side of the tin 250 years ago, but that's utopian thinking.
The problem isn't the size or nature of government or the size of the population, it's that an embarrassingly under-educated populace can be manipulated into giving away their rights and freedoms to incompetent, corrupt morons. Neither direct democracy nor communism work and will never work at any large scale. What needs to happen is to give up on the false fantasy of "freedom of choice" and shift towards public administration through sortition. Throw away political parties, career politicians, PACs, billionaires, and Hobson's choice voting that doesn't matter to be replaced with limited duration "jury duty". Also, a fourth actual co-equal branch of government to audit and check the other 3 appears necessary given the Gödel's loophole-like weaknesses that have been exploited in a era with handheld mass broadcasting and generative LLMs that can create entirely fake media potentially manipulating millions into committing atrocities.
wow that’s dark
what are these godel works you speak of?
Exploiting and debugging are not the same thing
without the exploit in hand few would believe the vuln was actionable if only because it hadn’t been used before.