It looks very weird if a congress-person in the US votes against the party, isn't it?. In Brazil it is not that unnusual.

In Brazil vote-buying happens through suit-cases full of dollars, in the US it happens through lobbying and promises of cushy jobs after you leave congress. Both are bad but suit-cases are much worse.

This is also why it is so hard to actually enact reforms in Brazil, literally impossible to pass any big reforms without bribing a lot of people. Some politicians will actively vote against passing bills just because they didn't get a kickback.

Lobbying is just corruption legalized. The only reason they use suit-cases and underwear filled with money in Brazil is because the corruption hasn’t developed the same veneer of legality yet.

The ideal amount of corruption is not 0, but equating lobbying to suit-cases is disingenuous. Suite-cases are far more damaging and cheaper way to get congress votes and only brings the most unscrupulous people who want to plunder the most out of government intervention.

There are of course multiple ways to do multi-party systems, and the Brazilian system is quite different from some other multi-party systems.

IMHO the state of things in the US seems unique dysfunctional. None of the major institutions really work as were intended. The constitution is so hard to change that it's effectively ossified, which results in the Supreme Court deciding on huge swaths of life. In a healthy democratic system, many of these should be decided by democratic vote and not a tea-leaf reading of a vague 250-year old sentence.