[jjk166]

The checks and balances do exist, they're just not being used. It took some extreme circumstances and decades of work for a single party to seize control of all the levers of government, and active collusion to continuously enable this level of dysfunction. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of people scattered across the various branches of federal government, both elected and career bureaucrats, who could put a stop to this at any time but choose not to. An extremely vocal, and not-insignificant sized chunk of the populace fanatically supports these actions. This is not a broken system, this is a fully functional well oiled machine being used skillfully to do horrible things.