There is a point in the decline of republics when the problem is no longer that government breaks its own laws. Governments will always behave unlawfully. The deeper problem comes when the constitutional machinery designed to prevent those acts stops functioning — when spending becomes detached from arithmetic, presidential power becomes detached from law and Congress and the courts become detached from the Constitution.

That’s where America is today.

(…)

The twilight of our constitutional republic has not arrived because the sun suddenly disappeared. It has arrived because, little by little, nearly everyone became accustomed to the darkness.