If you believe, like I do, that there are a lot of parallels between the US of today and the Rome of yesteryear, you might find the answer by reading Tacitus.

It turns out, long after Rome had become an Empire and was only a Republic in name only, most Senators still thought of it as a Republic and that this extraordinary state of affairs with the Senate just being a glorified rubber stamp body would soon come to an end and that, they will very soon restore the Senate to its former rightful place, just as soon as this current very limited crises was over.

As it turns out, they were never able to do that again.

It’s so interesting to me that nearly all of the Founding Fathers had read Tacitus and were keenly aware of this and explicitly tried to design a system to prevent that from happening. To their credit, their system lasted a good while.