Not that any of the scandals or court rulings actually MATTER to the Unchecked President

[khagler]

As people have pointed out here, it's more of a gradual process, but I suspect that in the future history lessons simplified for schoolchildren will mark the Bush/Obama years as the starting point, as it was then that the President openly seized power to arbitrarily imprison, torture, and murder people.

Here's a good quote on the gradual process:

What hap­pened here was the grad­ual habit­u­a­tion of the peo­ple, lit­tle by lit­tle, to being gov­erned by sur­prise; to receiv­ing deci­sions delib­er­ated in secret; to believ­ing that the sit­u­a­tion was so com­pli­cated that the gov­ern­ment had to act on infor­ma­tion which the peo­ple could not under­stand, or so dan­ger­ous that, even if the peo­ple could not under­stand it, it could not be released because of national secu­rity… Each step was so small, so incon­se­quen­tial, so well explained or, on occa­sion, ‘regret­ted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the begin­ning, unless one under­stood what the whole thing was in prin­ci­ple, what all these ‘lit­tle mea­sures’ that no ‘patri­otic [citizen]’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it devel­op­ing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn grow­ing. One day it is over his head.