What is a weakness with the legislative branch?

One weakness of the legislative branch is that it could be difficult to pass a law. We are seeing that scenario play out to some degree today. Because there are two houses of Congress, an issue may arise if a different political party controls each house of Congress. If those parties differ significantly over many issues, little might get accomplished. Additionally, if the President is from a different party than both houses of Congress, little...

One weakness of the legislative branch is that it could be difficult to pass a law. We are seeing that scenario play out to some degree today. Because there are two houses of Congress, an issue may arise if a different political party controls each house of Congress. If those parties differ significantly over many issues, little might get accomplished. Additionally, if the President is from a different party than both houses of Congress, little might get done in this situation.

President Obama is from the Democratic Party while the Republicans control both houses of Congress. Because there isn’t a great working relationship between the President and the Congress, the threat of a presidential veto is always present. Since the Republicans don’t control two-thirds of both houses of Congress, it would be hard to override a veto. As a result, there has been some difficulty in reaching an agreement with proposed laws. At times, the President wanted to see a certain concept be put into a law. However, since Congress is controlled by the Republicans who didn't agree with the President about this concept, no action was taken and the idea never became a law. After the election in 2012, the Democrats controlled the Senate while the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives. Since these parties had very different opinions on various issues, there wasn’t a lot of agreement on bills, and many bills never got passed.

There are circumstances where the legislative branch is split between the parties that control each house, or the President is from a different party than the party that controls both houses of Congress. As a result, it becomes more difficult to a pass a law, which is one weakness of the legislative branch.