@InUnfunky: "Institutions" are only people. That's one of the warnings the founders of the United States kept telling people. Hence the warning from B. Franklin, "A republic, ma'am, if you can keep it."
All systems get gamed, and it's up to the people/society to be vigilant enough and determined enough to "just say no" to shit like we've had going on more and more since, oh, the 1800s. That said, it's been generally incremental with the periodic "great leap forward". The 20th century was...
@InUnfunky: ...the worst in that regard. The problem, IMO, was and still is that people along the way didn't want at all to do the work of amending and changing things but rather re-interpreting and re-re-interpreting and reversing and unreversing and so forth all the laws on the books and in the Contsitution. "Too much work and not enough time for constitutional conventions" and such. Band-Aids don't work in the trenches under fire.