You are, sort of, correct.
Our system was designed for a limited government that did very few things. The whole point of all those lovely "checks and balances" is to keep the government from functioning efficiently.
This works quite well as long as the government doesn't do much. It doesn't work at all well when the government is trying to run a social-democrat Euro-style welfare state.
Which leads to the government ignoring the Constitution in order to do what it was elected to do.
I contend we need to either return the government to its original limited functions (my preference) or completely revamp the system so that an activist government can function reasonably efficiently.
A parliamentary system has very few formal checks and balances. A party that wins a majority can promptly implement the program it ran on in full. This obviously has both advantages and disadvantages.
Your explanation finally makes sense of what we are facing.
In other words, the intended limited government got to the point, little by little, one step at a time, where it’s become like a parliamentary system government, without the checks and balances of the parliamentary system, which are, if nothing else, the possibility of a quick change of the ruling elite.