The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government by Mike Lofgren (Audiobook)
From chapter 02:
The Visible State and the Invisible State
There is the visible United States government, situated in imposing neoclassical buildings around the Mall in Washington, D.C., and there is another, more shadowy and indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is the tip of an iceberg that is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg operates on its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.
During the last half-dozen years, the news media have been flooded with pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. Conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this development. But it is imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique. On one level, it is self-evident: in the domain that the public can see, Congress and the executive branch are hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.
Other than in the two-year period after his inauguration, when Democrats held both the House and the Senate, President Obama has not been able to enact most of his domestic policies and budgets. Because of incessant GOP filibustering, not only could he not fill the numerous vacancies in the federal judiciary, he could not even get some of his most innocuous presidential appointees into office. Democrats controlling the Senate during the 113th Congress responded by weakening the filibuster, but Republicans inevitably retaliated with other parliamentary delaying tactics.
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