The single most important defining characteristic of an authoritarian dictatorship is that the authoritarian leader uses the power of the state to maintain his own personal power. This is something that "divided government" - three separate branches of government that are coequal - was designed to prevent.

With Mitch McConnell promoting Dershowitz's idea that a president can commit any kind of crime he wants so long as it gets him reelected because he "believes his reelection is in the public interest," we are about to see our American democratic republic transformed into an oligarchic semi-dictatorship. This is exactly what the Founders warned us against, and may well be the death-knell of not only our democracy, but of democracy around the world.

-Thom