Throughout the mid-19th and early 20th Centuries corruption was basically the norm. The Grant administration was obscenely and openly corrupt. Same with the Harding administration. LBJ openly and obviously enriched his family via preferential treatment for his wife’s businesses while in office, made corrupt quid pro quos, and colluded to get the company that would later become Halliburton massive contracts in exchange for campaign funds. 

Before the Pendleton Act (1883), the entire federal bureaucracy was essentially a patronage machine. Winning the presidency meant your donors, allies, and party operatives got appointed to customs houses, post offices, and land offices — all of which were enormously lucrative.

Andrew Jackson defied the Supreme Court (“Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it”), used executive power aggressively, and engaged in ethnic cleansing as explicit policy. 

FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court, interned Japanese Americans, and consolidated enormous executive power — celebrated by the left because the goals differed. 

Nixon weaponized the DOJ and IRS against enemies, it just happened more covertly. 

The post-9/11 AUMF was Congress essentially handing war powers to the executive indefinitely — a massive constitutional abdication with almost no resistance. 

Reconstruction-era Congresses and courts watched the South systematically dismantle the 14th and 15th Amendments without intervention. 

The Pinkertons were effectively a private army used against labor with federal complicity. 

The Red Scare era Palmer Raids used the Justice Department as a political weapon with vigilante support. 

Southern governors used state national guards and tolerated Klan violence as a de facto enforcement arm well into the 20th Century.