Much of what you listed in your bullet points occurred during the last administration as well and much of it has been continuing under the current one so there really is no need to wonder; yes it does happen here and now.

My theory on why Congress has "lost it's balls" has to do with term limits placed on the Presidency but not correspondingly on the Congress. Now that the Executive has a limited time in office it becomes easier to cede the hard and potentially career damaging decisions and the power that goes with them to the man who will be gone in maximum of two and a half terms anyway because if he makes an unpopular decision he doesn't have as much to loose as those in Congress. That way the numb-skulls in Congress get to avoid doing anything that might make them look bad to their constituents and they can constantly be campaigning for their next term and obsessing about their image with a minimized risk of becoming unpopular. This is an imbalance of power that has been growing since the death of FDR and I believe it is dangerous and places too much authority in the executive branch. Once a "new" power is vested in or claimed by the Presidency it is never relinquished which results in an ever increasing consolidation of authority in the executive branch, if this trend continues the best that we could hope for would be "benevolence". If term limits were imposed on the Congress you would see those clowns become a little less willing to hand over their power to the President and maybe a little more willing to make the hard decisions. In my gut I don't like the idea of term limits because they are actually democracy limits but I see no logical alternative for helping to clean up our current state of affairs.
--
“If at first you don’t succeed redefine what you did as success.”- Stephen Colbert