Will a midterm pummeling change the regulatory departments that oversee mergers and anti-trust?

Ah to have such hope.

Even if I was this optimistic, the executive with a stuffed supreme court is not going to care what congress thinks.

We'll sooner declare market manipulation a form of speech.

Even if Congress may reverse things in the future, there are many opportunistic things happening right now, and it seems like the spacex situation is one of them. The emerging picture feels like a 'flood the zone' strategy (not by coordination, but by practical effect).

While other commenters have pointed out lots of details that point towards the favorable structural environment going forward, another idea that roots my thoughts towards this is that by creating facts on the ground, they are defining the new starting point.

Ultimately, reversing all of the different 'wrongs' or irregularities will be costly to both the opposition's political and attentional capital.

Going to do my best to respond to this while still following the HN guidelines:

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

RIMR says:

> nobody will ever challenge this, given the current political direction of the United States

It's obviously hyperbole to say that NOBODY will EVER challenge this, but I'd say it's directionally correct:

1. The Supreme Court is controlled by a conservative, pro-big-business majority that makes it very difficult for any legal attempts to challenge Elon's actions to survive litigation.

2. The United States Senate has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due its over-representation of rural voters and its internal norms (filibuster)

3. The United States House has a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the gerrymandering efforts of Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country (which the Democrats have tried to counter and failed, see Virginia)

4. The conservative, pro-big-business Supreme Court has ensured that elections in the United States overall have a conservative, pro-big-business bias due to the unfettered spending allowed after Citizens United.

So yes, the winds seems to be against Republicans and Trump in the mid-terms, but the structural biases of the government are still very much pro-big-business, pro-capital, and anti-regulation.

It will take much more than a single mid-term cycle to reverse that trend.

> the current political direction points squarely to Republicans getting absolutely pummelled in the midterms

Even if so, are the Democrats really going to do the house cleaning required to fix this? Their recent history implies that they'll try to pretend things are running normally, until it all explodes in their face (again). Maybe I'm wrong, and they'll actually fight for the country, but... I'm not surprised that companies (and markets) are expecting them to just... not.