Congress has left Washington for a five-week recess, and it’s hard to see much difference. Even while in session, the national legislature has gotten precious little done the past two years.

Gridlock is now the operating principle. There are always formidable obstacles to getting legislation passed in a system which requires two chambers, and the president, to agree. But there’s been nothing like this inability to act on major national issues in at least two generations.

So it seemed a good time to check in with Angus King, who in 2013 became Maine’s first new senator in 16 years, following Olympia Snowe’s retirement — prompted, she made clear, by the Senate’s inability to get things done.

King made ending gridlock part of his independent candidacy, but quickly learned how ingrained it had become. When I interviewed him that spring at the Capitol, he was incredulous that Senate Republicans had just filibustered legislation to provide universal background checks for gun purchases. After the deaths of 26 second graders and teachers at Newtown Elementary School, it seemed impossible Congress would fail to act on a requirement 90 percent of the public supported.

Yet the background check vote became a template for the session, climaxed by fellow freshman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) prompting a government shutdown over implementation of the Affordable Care Act, among the most irresponsible uses of Congressional budget power in history.

The Senate, however, isn’t the worst offender. Last June, it passed a bipartisan immigration reform bill by 68-32, about as strong a consensus as possible on a controversial issue. The bill balances funding for “border control” with a lengthy “path to citizenship” for an estimated 11 million immigrants without papers who are already here.

The House did nothing. “Not only will they not vote on the bill, they won’t even take up parts of the bill,” said King in a phone interview.

King said the House is adhering to the “Hastert rule,” named after former Speaker Dennis Hastert, which says that, unless Republicans have a majority of their caucus, they won’t bring a bill to a vote, even though it would pass, as with the immigration bill.

King says this “rule” puts a small minority in charge — in this case, 118 representatives, barely more than a quarter of the House’s 435 members. And with Tea Party members in control, nothing happens.

It bothers King that certain Republican orthodoxies — on taxes, for instance — thwart action even after consensus is achieved.

Nearly every governor in the 45 states with sales taxes, including Maine’s Paul LePage, favors the Marketplace Fairness Act, which would require on-line retailers to charge tax in the purchaser’s home state. Once a formidable undertaking, this transaction is now simple, thanks to computer software that the bill would supply free to retailers.

King notes that the Senate bill, which passed 69-27 last May, was sponsored by arch-conservative Republican Sen. Mike Enzi, yet the House hasn’t even taken a committee vote. “I think they’re allergic to the word ‘tax,’ ” he said — even though the bill would apply an existing tax, not a new one.

The same goes for the federal Highway Trust Fund, depleted by Congress’ failure to adjust the gasoline tax for 20 years. “We’ve kicked that can down the road 11 times,” King said.

The Senate faced its own version of the “Hastert rule,” the filibuster, which King says was being overused by minority Republicans, failing to act on dozens of nominations made by President Obama, who’d just been re-elected.

Finally, Majority Leader Harry Reid invoked a rule change known as the “nuclear option” — elimination of the filibuster for all nominations except the Supreme Court.

The rules change, which King supported, resulted in seating three new members of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, as well as Obama nominees to numerous federal agencies. It also provided a federal judge for Maine, Jon Levy, who’d been caught in the partisan standoff. Still, “there are 40 or 50 vacant ambassadorships,” King said. “That doesn’t help us.”

What’s surprising is that, despite dire warnings from Republicans about changing the rules, how few consequences there have been. “There were a few angry speeches, but I don’t see how it’s affected the way we do business,” King said.

And that provides a clue to ultimately breaking gridlock. Standing against compromise seems much more important to certain congressional leaders than it does to the public.

The voters can’t mandate that their representatives act in the national interest, but they can reward cooperation and punish obstruction at the ballot box. That, however, may take awhile longer.

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Douglas Rooks is a former daily and weekly newspaper editor who has covered the State House for 29 years. He can be reached at [email protected].