As a Russian national: no, the USA is not yet at nearly the same level of corruption.
The main bulwark against Russianification is not the Congress or the SCOTUS, it's the true federative nature of the US. States have a lot of very real autonomy and they limit the amount of corrupt overreach.
States absolutely have autonomy. And not just on paper. And a lot of it is just in the amount of friction that the federal government can get.
E.g. Trump sent ICE goons to MN and now he's embroiled in dozens of lawsuits because of that. Yes, he probably will win most of them eventually, but they all take time and energy. With a lot of negative PR along the way.
> MN can't even give two murderers a fair trial because apparently Trump's goons can kill anyone they want, and then go scurry off like roaches.
Give it time.
> If states had autonomy, those animals and their accomplices would be behind bars right now.
So that southern states could just shoot the Federal agents de-segregating schools, right? It's always a balancing act.
The key here is that the power is _distributed_. Nobody has the absolute power, even if it seems so. And it doesn't even matter that much that individual states are less than incorrupt (see: TX, WA, IL). All that matters is that they have their own agendas that don't necessarily align with the Federal one.
Murder is a capital crime regardless of who you work for.
Those fucks were violating both federal and state law.
'Give it time' will only work if the GOP is removed from power. Otherwise, not a single thing will happen.
Otherwise, you are demonstrating that states are in practice fully subservient to the federal government. Because the latter can, de facto, do whatever it wants in them.
BTW, another example of autonomy is the fact that Trump had to send ICE agents in the first place. He could not just order the local police to perform the raids, there's simply no chain of command for that.
In Russia, it would have been one phone call from the Kremlin to the local chief of police.
The main bulwark against Russianification is not the Congress or the SCOTUS, it's the true federative nature of the US. States have a lot of very real autonomy and they limit the amount of corrupt overreach.