The NIH is being slashed and burned, not "reformed"

This time around the changes might actually take effect quickly enough for people to feel them during the current administration.

Compared to the previous playbook of making changes and then blaming the effects on the next administration. While taking credit for everything good kicking in from the previous administration of course.

Can somebody help me understand: say I have a research grant and my cap on how much university can take for its operations is 15%. Does it mean that from my 85% I can not buy/rent necessary equipment/facilities previously provided by university anymore?

Why do you seem to believe anything I'm talking about involves the Senate mattering?

I've discussed how the House had its membership artificially capped roughly 150 years into this country's history

For one thing, the Supreme Court are the ones that ruled that the president has some form of immunity in the first place, and it wouldn't be that unprecedented for them to rein that in a bit if it comes to them again; see the follow-up to Bruen in Rahimi where basically all of them other than Thomas seemed to want to walk back their previous ruling a bit. Although it's hard for me to imagine how they could have been surprised at all about the aftermath of their ruling in Bruen, it does sometimes seem to me like some of the more "moderate" conservative justices forget that they're playing with live ammo (if you'll pardon the pun) and not just debating abstract principles. I don't pretend to have any sort of confidence in what they'd actually do if presented with another case against Trump, but I don't think it would be _that_ surprising if they decided to try to find some technicality where they can claim he still has immunity for most things but for some reason it wouldn't apply to the current issue under question. I'm also not going to claim with any sort of confidence that ruling against him would be effective at reining him in, since there already seems to be a large contingent of his supporters eager for him to just flat out ignore court rulings that have much less personal stakes for him.

The other remedy that still technically merits a mention even if it's somewhat implausible to happen any time soon is that Congress does still have the power to impeach and remove the president. I don't see it as super likely that Republicans would turn against him at this point, since pretty much all of the internal opposition has been driven out of the party over the past decade, but I'm guessing that it also would have been almost unthinkable for Nixon to go from winning every state other than Massachusetts in 1972 to losing so much support in 1974 that his own party told him that he might as well resign rather than have more than half of his own party's senators vote with the Democrats to remove him from office[0]. Even though I think the people who voted for Trump tend to be much more passionate in their support for him, and the norms for what behavior is considered "acceptable" as a politician have expanded dramatically (not in small part from Trump himself), I think there's still an argument to be made that Trump isn't as popular as Nixon was at this point in second term, and it's at least theoretically possible to imagine a scenario where his support eroded to the point that he lost enough support to continue with what he's doing. Even if his supporters aren't ever going to turn against him, there aren't nearly as many of them that there were for Nixon, so maybe the most likely of the unlikely scenarios for this would be a large enough Democrat majority getting elected during the midterms that they (possibly along with some of the few remaining moderate Republicans in the Senate) could remove him. (This would of course still leave Vance as president, assuming he didn't also get impeached and convicted, so he could pardon Trump, but that still removes him from power for at least couple of years, and Vance being a relatively recent convert to Trumpism doesn't seem like he'd be able to command nearly as much loyalty as Trump himself has).

As for what could actually cause something like this to take place, I have to wonder if the most likely scenario would literally be another pandemic. Not only does the previous one have a reasonable claim to being what caused him to lose in 2020, a lot of the policies he's currently enacting seem like they'd backfire spectacularly in the face of another pandemic (e.g. cutting vaccine mandates in schools, appointing Kennedy as HHS secretary when him being antivax is probably the most well known thing about him, and the recent flirting with cutting Medicaid in order to pay for the tax cuts...)

[0]: from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_process_against_Ri...:

> During the late afternoon of August 7, Senators Goldwater and Scott and Congressman Rhodes met with Nixon in the Oval Office and told him his support in Congress had all but disappeared. Scott told reporters afterward that they did not pressure Nixon to resign, but simply told the president that "the situation is very gloomy on Capitol Hill." Rhodes told the president he would face certain impeachment when the articles came up for vote in the full House. By Majority Leader O'Neill's estimate, no more than 75 representatives were willing to vote against the obstruction-of-justice article. Goldwater and Scott told the president that not only were there enough votes in the Senate to convict him, but that no more than 15 or so senators were willing to vote for acquittal. Goldwater later wrote that as a result of the meeting, Nixon "knew beyond any doubt that one way or another his presidency was finished." That night, Nixon finalized his decision to leave office.

There's a lot that can be said about this like how we got here, what's really going on and what we do about it but honestly, it's all pretty pointless. Nothing is going to change.

We had 60 years of near-total Democratic control of Congress until, in the 1990s, the Democrats abandoned New Deal policies in favor of neoliberalism. Even this was a culmination of what began decades earlier, specifically that real wages stagnated and the wealth and income gaps grew starting around 1971 [1].

On the other side we have the Republican Project, a 50+ year effort to take over the government and reshape America as a Christian theocracy. Why? White supremacy, never getting over the end of chattel slavery, manifest destiny, all that. And it all started with the end of segregation and the effort to fight that using the issue of abortion as a weapon.

We have a Supreme Court that will go down in history as with the likes of Dred Scott. Citizens United, Dobbs, the historical tradition test, major questions doctrine and of course completely inventing presidential immunity out of thin air. But it's not just them. It's every layer of the courts thanks to pushing "originalist" propaganda (which was invented in the 1980s). Certain judges completely slow-walked prosecutions to benefit Trump directly. And brazenly.

Thanks to the takeover of states in 2010 in particular, districts are gerrymandered to hell to the point where, for example, Republicans managed a supermajority in Wisconsin despite getting 38% of the vote.

But what makes this fatal is there is absolutely no opposition to any of it. The Democratic Party are complicit in all of it. They are controlled opposition. They are more concerned with lining up their post-political lobbying and consulting careers than effecting any real change or opposition. In fact, the biggest threat to the Democratic Party isn't fascism, it's progressives. If the DNC opposed Trump half as well as they opposed Bernie Sanders, we'd be living in a very different world.

In the last election, Kamala Harris offered absolutely nothing to voters. Every policy was vetted by her brother to make sure Wall Street approved. Kamala Harris would rather lose an election to Trump tha adopt any progressive policies, desppite progressive policies doing incredibly well in ballot iniatives (eg minimum wage increase passed in Missouri, a deep red state).

The Democratic establishment will tell you progressive ideas aren't popular despite electroal evidence to the contrary, namely Obama's 2008 campaign, which was an electoral blowout. Sadly, Obama quickly abandoned any such policies.

None of what is happening now is intended to make anything more efficient. It's just destruction of the state that regulates and occasionaally holds billionaires accountable. Food, drugs, health, housing, education... everything is going to get worse. And it's nothing to do with the deficit either. The budget blueprint has $2 trillion in cuts and (drum roll please) $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.

These people and the voters idolize (even fetishize) a very narrow window in history: the 1950s. Yet they never look at the policies that were in effect at that time, specifically much higher taxes. Plus, all these middle class families had underpaid help thanks to segregation and other forms of institutionalized racism.

And on the foreign policy front, the administration is destroying the instruments of its own soft power (eg USAID). They keep telling us "China is the enemy" while creating a massive power vacuum China will happily fill.

At least in China you have better infrastructure, public transit, high speed rail, affordable health care and better access to education.

[1]: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/