> ...Congress having lost the ability to make clear headed laws.
When do you imagine they had such ability, and does much of th Byzantine nature of the securities laws really post-date that period?
> There is so much friction in the partisan fights.
No more than usual, except in the sense that because of the partisan realignment (or two overlapping realignments, one stemming from the New Deal itself, the other from Johnson's signing on to civil rights) from the New Deal until the 1990s the bitter ideological fights were somewhat less often aligned with party boundaries.
