It has become like this slowly over time but it is still pretty recent. Within the last 20 years. It became especially bad starting in 2016. I feel like that election caused a lot of institutions to start becoming partisan and also to start abusing every power or loophole or whatever.
Nope, long before that. It just took a long time for the results to become clear. Mitch McConnell has basically spent his entire political career working towards exactly where we are now: every branch of the government controlled by republicans.