Checks and balances are all very well, but sometimes you have to wonder. The first session of the 110th Congress came to a close last week in a disorderly crush of half-baked legislation. It was the end of a year that gave the new Democratic leadership little to boast about. Seizing control of House and Senate in the 2006 elections, the Democrats had big ideas about holding the Bush administration to account, forcing a prompt withdrawal from Iraq and radically realigning the government’s domestic priorities. Measured against those early promises, their record has been dismal.

The budget process was an unintelligible mess – not for the first time, admittedly. An omnibus $555bn spending bill, lumping together who knows how many appropriations bills, finally passed. The president gave it his blessing, because it gave him enough of what he wanted – including $70bn additional funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Admittedly, that is less than half the extra war funding the administration had asked for, but enough for the army to keep going without another supplemental until June.

The rush of unfinished business also included the long-anticipated fix of the alternative minimum tax. This is a parallel income tax, allowing only limited deductions, initially devised to curb tax avoidance by the very rich. Due to years of neglect and rising incomes, it threatened to drag millions of middle-class taxpayers into its net. Patching it up so that this would not happen cost $53bn in forgone revenue.

This was another defeat for the Democrats because pay-as-you-go rules, which require the money to be made up somewhere else and which the new Congressional majority had promised to abide by, were waived at Republican insistence.

So what has the Democrats’ electoral victory of November 2006 actually yielded? During the year there were 60-odd Iraq-related votes. The pledge to force a withdrawal of American forces went unfulfilled. The new energy bill, also part of the end-of-session rush, does include the first increase in Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards since the 1970s (though new taxes and renewable energy provisions that Democrats also wanted were stripped out). A minimum wage increase survived. There was action on one or two recommendations of the 9/11 Commission and revised ethics rules for Congress. Let us not forget student-loan relief. If you add it all up, and multiply by 10, it is still much less than a seismic shift.

“But for the president and the Bush Republicans in the Senate, we could have accomplished so much more,” remarked Harry Reid, leader of the Senate Democrats. Well, quite. When he was promising to accomplish so much more in January, it must have slipped Mr Reid’s mind that George W. Bush was president and there were 49 Republicans in the Senate.

The Democrats promised too much and now look foolish, but whose fault is the impasse – and who, if anyone, will pay the political price? The constitution is implicated, of course. It provides for this kind of thing, by equipping the president with veto power. The Senate’s rules on filibusters throw another spanner in the works. (You need 60 votes in the Senate to stop a filibuster; the Democrats have 51.) This past year, President Bush has used the veto threat constantly and there have been a record 62 filibusters. At times like this, the mightiest nation on the planet renders itself ungovernable. It is an unsettling thing to watch. And this year’s session is likely to look productive in comparison with next year’s, when electile dysfunction will be added to the mix.

When it works, divided government works well. Bill Clinton made common cause with a Republican Congress to pass welfare reform (in an election year, to boot). But in this system, intransigence on one side is enough to make everything stop. For the moment, there is intransigence on all three sides – in both parties in Congress and at the White House too. Congressional Republicans want to tie everything down and Democrats have no desire to form alliances with the other side. Accusations of bad faith are constantly hurled around. Everybody thinks that gridlock gives them a political advantage, because voters will blame it on their opponents, not on them.

There was one rare exception to this syndrome and its fate was especially dispiriting. The summer’s attempted immigration reform was a bipartisan initiative supported by the White House. It aroused a popular backlash and the plan was ditched.

The immigration issue continues to fester and with time will only prove harder to resolve. Other matters too cry out for urgent attention: tax reform; healthcare (a bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Programme has been bouncing back and forth between Congress and the White House); energy policy and climate change; regulation of the mortgage business; education (the president’s No Child Left Behind initiative, which promotes testing and school accountability, is up for reauthorisation); trade (the Doha Round and a clutch of bilateral trade deals are in the balance); and more besides. There you have it: next year’s agenda for inaction.

Earlier this month, the Democratic senator Charles Schumer said that “the only good news out of this obstructionism ... is that [Republicans] are building our case to get more votes in the Senate ... That message is going to resonate. You watch.” But Americans are not watching. They are either too bored, or too disgusted.

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