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Comment by martythemaniak | Hacker News Reader

Assuming the expected thing happens and Trump gets shellacked in the midterms, do Americans think this will have some impact (ie reverse or accelerate) the current trend of cuts to science, cracking down on foreign students, cuts to NIH, HHS etc? Those being big recent change in this area.

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I'm not American, but since those things are being done by the executive branch, with the approval of the Supreme Court, I'm not sure changes in congress will make much of a difference.

Short of impeachment (reasons for which are not in short supply, but which seems unlikely) there's not much congress can actually do to change things. 60 votes is a tough threshold to reach.

It might stop the bleeding, but it won't repair the damage, is how I think of it.

I'm 50, and I am thinking basically "the rest of my life" is what it will take to start fixing some of this stuff, if it's even possible.

We could have had a slowly declining empire and a smooth handoff.

Instead we decided to elect a bunch of people to burn it all down and speedrun the fall of Rome.

We'll still be a world power at the end of it--in the same way France and England are world powers.

Oiy you people are boring. The US will remain a world power just due to its geographical position. It owns the Americas economically and militarily. This is something no other country in the world is close to capable of doing.

Modern day France or England are pretty nice places to live in a lot of ways. Better, in terms of day to day life, than when they were empires.

Even in the worst case scenario for Trump, the Democrats won't have a veto-proof majority. Trump will need to negotiate much harder and make concessions, but will largely keep doing what he was elected to do.

Also, the current projections don't point to a major Democrat victory. On average, midterms flip 27 seats. This midterm will likely flip 20-25 seats: a clear victory, but below average. A major victory would be like the 2010 against Obama (almost 70 seats flipped).

He will continue to ignore Congress and the current laws on the books, probing the limits of what the Supreme Court will allow him to get away with.

He hasn’t bothered to work with a Republican Congress to pass laws. He certainly won’t bother with a Democratic or split Congress.

Democrats winning the midterms would moderately accelerate this. They won't have a veto-proof majority so they won't be able to enact any of their policies; however, they will be able to prevent Trump from making any improvements. They have shown countless times that harming Trump is more important to them than the good of the country (ex: they're openly cheering for Iran), so you can bet they will have no interest in advancing any sort of new research that has Republican support.

I wouldn't say I support Iran, but I'm not happy that we attacked them in an illegal war of aggression (Congress approves legal wars).

I see no reason to believe they were close to having nuclear weapons. Trump didn't say anything about nukes when he announced the beginning of the war, they made that up later.

I disapprove of the Iran war, but to play devils advocate: there's a major shift occurring right now in the way wars are fought. The Ukraine-Russia war has made it clear that conventional militaries will find themselves in a meat grinder in the next war.. that includes the US.

Iran is one of the largest drone producers... and the US military is doing live testing of anti-drone weapons and energy directed weapons in the straight of hormuz against Iranian drones.

A lot of Americans are going to die in the next war if we don't figure out the right way to maintain our dominance against these new tactics.

Trump hasn’t proposed any improvements except maybe year round DST, so we wouldn’t miss it much. Trump has tried to brand the democrats as pro-Iran for not supporting his war, and it has worked on some people like you, but most of us don’t see it his way. You can be against a war and not for the country the war is with.

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