Not everyone in Congress is asleep, delusional, or corrupt.
On February 26 in his weekly “Time to Wake Up” speech, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse discussed the relationship between “dark money” in elections, Congressional gridlock, and the inability of Congress to act on climate change.
America is ruled by an oligarchy which uses its vast supply of politically-available money to control governemtn, media, universities, etc., for the usually-corporate purposes of the managers of those corporations. democracy plays a smaller and smaller part these days.
Democracy is not a perfect method of governance, but oligarchy shows itself to be far worse, because pressure by BIG-OIL and others on government aimed at preventing a useful and timely (and necessarily mammoth!) response to climate change hav paralyzed government and are leading the world-system to destruction.
The power of money on politics must be defeated if there is to be progress on almost ANY front. Climate Change is undoubtedly the most important of tese, but there are many more, many of them also environmental matters such as clean water and clean air.
Money is not speech, whatever the benighted Supreme Court seems to think, and if it does not soon reverse itself, its monumentally incorrect view should be taken out of the picture by Constitutional Amendment.