That this level of wisdom is buried layers deep in an HN post is a bit of a shame.

Spot on.

An evil government is not going to obey the laws anyway, so might as well make the well meaning government more effective to prevent the other one.

[delayed]

Your perspective of history seems limited to the current first world countries.

Governments in Asia, Africa, and South America routinely ignore laws for petty reasons.

Yeah, that means you didn't have the proper seperation of powers to begin with, which was kinda the point of my argument.

If you're down that road and eroded that seperation, getting that thing back into the bottle is really hard without revolutions or massive public uproar. If you never had that seperation to begin with, even worse.

TL;DR: evil governments can ignore laws if the justice system is not independent. Hence the inportance of keeping it independent.