This is actually what I think is most dangerous in US politics right now. Nixon resigned to avoid an inevitable impeachment. Today? He's stay in office, have im

This is actually what I think is most dangerous in US politics right now. Nixon resigned to avoid an inevitable impeachment. Today? He's stay in office, have impeachment defeated on a straight party-line vote and then declare victory against "fake news". The Senate obstruction of Obama was unprecedented. The subversion of the Justice Department is unprecedented. The White House going months without a press briefing is unprecedented (in modern times). The erosion of public institutions doesn't seem to matter. Nor does the public trust in those institutions. Winning matters. Getting your agenda through no matter what matters. And that's so dangerous. This, by the way, is why mandatory voting (as we have in Australia) is so important and so much better. In the US, the election process itself is politicized. What you have is highly organized efforts aimed at voter suppression because people are allowed not to vote so much so that the GOP had to enter into a 35 year consent decree to prevent voter suppression [1]. What a lot of liberals don't understand (for the record, I include myself in that camp) is how angry the idea of activist judges makes conservatives. In US constitutional law you really have two major schools of thought: the "living document" school and the "literalists". The second group think the constitution says what it says. If you want to change that, there's a process for that (ie a constitutional amendment). The "living document" school thinks the constitution should be viewed through the lens of the times and it asks questions like "what would the Founders have written or meant today?" Broadly speaking, literalists are the conservatives and "living document" types are liberals. Judicial conservatives think there was no constitutional basis for the SCOTUS decision to legalize gay marriage. They feel like "dignity" was another invented right, just like "privacy" was an invented right that legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade. And whether or not you agree with those things in principle, you shouldn't dismiss how strongly many voters feel that legislatures not judges should enact those things. I strongly believe the combination of the SCOTUS gay marriage decision and having a black president while the candidate was HIlary Clinton was the perfect storm that was the only thing that could get Trump elected. But here's this relates to party over democracy: by any measure, Trump is a reprehensible human being. The level of hypocrisy required for religious conservatives to stand behind him is truly astounding. But they do it because we're now in a situation where the ends justifies the means and one of those key ends is packing the courts with young Conservative judges, something that'll have a legacy for decades to come. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_Security_Task_Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_Security_Task_Force