The United States of America was once famously “a nation of laws and not men,” but that distinction seems increasingly less true today. At both local and national levels we are largely governed instead by a small and incestuous permanent political class that keeps the rest of us in check.At its current rate of corrosion, our once republican form of government will soon be recognizable only as a caricature of what the framers once intended.As a brief refresher that shouldn’t be needed, in the year 1776, 13 …