Checks and Balances

Institutions under siege

Democracy breathes and survives when there are bulwarks and counterweights to the excesses, antics, illegalities and the will of the "leader." Without them democracies are doomed to languish or die because they lack either the oxygen or the light of transparency. The United States has for decades been the West's "beacon" when it comes to institutional countermeasures to authoritarianism.