US political gridlock stems from slavery-era veto point design

Evidence

So if Washington often feels broken, that’s because it was built that way. A 2011 study of twenty-three long-standing democracies identified the United States as the only country in the group that had four “veto points” empowered to block legislative action: the president, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court. Most other democracies in the study had just a single veto point. In those nations, parties govern, pass policies, and get voted in or out. Things happen at the federal level. But the United States government is characterized by political inaction—and that was by design. By creating political structures that weakened the role of the federal government’s ability to regulate slavery, the framers hobbled Washington’s ability to pass legislation on a host of other matters. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 539

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s stated goal: this is a core causal claim connecting design-for-slavery to present-day inaction — the reframing thesis in concrete institutional form. — connects to: Electoral rules have long served partisan entrenchment across American history — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 83
• QUESTION: Worth verifying the 2011 study’s methodology and whether its veto-point coding actually isolates US as the sole four-veto-point case.