American democracy is failing. The courts are finally starting to notice.

There is something profoundly wrong with the United States of America’s system of government.
For proof, briefly take stock of the last ten years in American democracy, in which a combination of factors — the filibuster, the way we draw legislative districts, Senate malapportionment, and the Electoral College — converged to rob American voters of a meaningful ability to choose their own leaders.

• In 2008, President Obama won a resounding victory, defeating Republican Sen. John McCain by nearly 10 million votes. Democrats also won commanding majorities in both houses of Congress, with Democrats holding 60 seats in the Senate at their peak. Nevertheless, the rump Republican minority was able to wield the filibuster to block many Democratic priorities altogether, and to effectively force Democrats to water down major legislation such as the stimulus and the Affordable Care Act, because the most conservative Democrats’ (and, sometimes, even some Republicans’) votes were needed to pass such bills.
• In 2010, in part because the watered down stimulus did not juice up the economy enough to keep the incumbent party from being blamed for the ongoing effects of the recession, Democrats took a bath at the polls. Though Democrats recovered their standing with the voters in the very next federal election, their deep losses in 2010 had profound consequences because they gave Republicans control of many crucial state legislatures and governors’ mansions during a redistricting cycle. Republicans drew state legislative and congressional maps that were so aggressively gerrymandered that, in some states, Republicans won over 70 percent of the congressional seats even in election years where Democrats won the popular vote.

https://thinkprogress.org/democracys-lost-decade-fca7ff06f064/