This particular instance is a disaster, no doubt, but the real issue is the bundling of completely unrelated provisions into single bills. It's absurd.
Congress, essentially, only passes one bill a year now, the budget. That's the case because everything else requires 60 votes because of the filibuster rules. Filibuster rules were changed because Obama wanted the affordable care act. Standing in the way of that was the Tea Party, the group of Republicans that don't negotiate.
I'm going to both sides this one because we now have the counterpart to that on the left with the progressives.
There exists a segment of both parties that refuse to negotiate from their ideologies. This makes sure that neither party is capable of passing legislation unless they have a super majority not including that wing of the party.
The infrastructure bill is one of the very few things that can break this because the centrists of both parties do actually like it quite a bit, they just have to dog and pony hating each other before they get it done.
That and war. We can all agree on war.
And there is a root cause at the bottom of all this dysfunctionality: FPTP voting and gerrymandering that always converges into a two-party system with most districts being "solid red" or "solid blue", leaving only a handful of (highly contested) "swing states/districts" to squabble over.
In the democratic party on the other hand, there is a range of ideologies. It's not the left party, its the centrist to the left party. Joe Manchin is no progressive but he wears the D. This is especially apparent in California state and local politics, where the majority of politicians are democrats but you don't see progress in actual progressive initiatives, like housing or transport or homeless services and mental health treatment initiatives. Most of the democrats in California state and local offices really aren't that progressive, and pander to a base with socially progressive but economically conservative tenancies (the classic NIMBY). For example, it's widely popular to publicly speak out against racism, but if you attempt to do something about it like change the racist zoning ordinances that are still pervasive in your city, you will probably destroy your political career in the process and see yourself replaced by a DINO.
In Europe, over the last decades our equivalents to the Democrats (mostly, Social Democrat parties) and Republicans (Christian Democrat/centrist parties) shrank in percentages and the political field widened. These days, you have in most countries everything on the spectrum: communist/tankies, democratic socialists, social democrats, christian democrat/centrists, free-market liberals, center-right, nationalist/far-right and (in some countries) outright fascist/neo-Nazi parties for the "mainstream" political orientation plus a host of special-issue parties - most notably Greens which have become mainstream in itself, national ethnic minority/indigenous representation parties, Pirate Parties, pan-european liberals, local voter associations/"Freie Wähler".
And all of these are to some degree viable, with voters flocking to whomever they want to support. Of course, coalition forming can be tedious (cough Netherlands, Israel), but it is actual representative democracy at work!
This is not true. No filibuster rules were changed to accommodate the ACA. You might be confused because prt of the ACA was passed under reconciliation, a long-existing exception to the filibuster rules that allows spending and taxation laws to be passed without requiring a supermajority to invoke cloture. Reconciliation has been part of the Senate rules since 1974.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_(United_States_...
Besides, mixing different topics is the only way anything can every be done: If you have a single issue you're fighting over with someone, zero-sum style, the best possible advice is to included something unrelated in the discussion, hoping that your interests differ in such a way that you can make trades beneficial to both parties.
My dumb idea is 'must fit on no more than 5 standard sheets of 8x11 piece of paper'. With exceptions to that needing a 75% majority.
My other dumb idea is about 4 people mostly control the vote. Majority/minority leader should be a rotating position. With the name drawn out of a hat.