The Week Magazine January 20, 2023

Roughly two decades ago, the Republican Party cemented the practice of never bringing any legislation to the floor of the House unless it was supported by a “majority of the majority.” The principle, known as the Hastert Rule, after House Speaker Dennis Hastert, essentially quashed any bipartisan legislation that wasn’t endorsed by House leadership—a predictable, if unfortunate, step in the polarization of Congress. Now the 118th Congress is starting with a new twist that turns that old rule on its head. It’s the “minority of the majority” rule: Nothing will happen in the House unless it gains the backing of the most extreme—and frankly, unhinged—faction of the majority party. Pundits used to decry the power of the House speaker to strangle new ideas in the crib. Most likely, in this…

What happened The new Republican House majority passed a package of rule changes and established new investigative committees this week, as Speaker Kevin McCarthy began delivering on deals he cut to win the votes of 20 far-right members who forced the most contentious election of a House speaker in over a century. McCarthy (R-Calif.) won the post after a televised battle that stretched over five days and 15 votes. He squeaked out a 216–212 win after the last six holdouts, including Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), agreed to vote “present” instead of for an alternate candidate. To win over extremists who attacked him as an “establishment” Republican, McCarthy agreed to concessions that give him a weak hold on the speaker’s gavel, while empowering GOP hard-liners. He consented to…

What happened President Biden touted a major shift in his approach to immigration this week, making a trip to the border after announcing an overhaul of the asylum process. The new “humanitarian parole” policy will allow a pathway to legal entry for up to 30,000 people a month from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Haiti, who will be able to get a U.S. work permit if they pass a background check and secure an American sponsor ahead of time. If migrants from those countries attempt to enter the U.S. at the border without such authorization, though, they risk being expelled immediately to Mexico under the administration’s expansion of Title 42, a pandemic-era public health rule. “Do not just show up at the border,” Biden warned would-be migrants. “Stay where you are and…

Gary McKee crossed his 365th finish line of the year to a cheering crowd and fireworks on Dec. 31, completing a challenge to run a full marathon every single day of 2022. Starting on Jan. 1, the northwest England resident ran 26.2 miles each morning, before going to work at the Sellafield nuclear site. The father of three raised over $1.2 million, which will be split between a cancer support center and a hospice-care organization. Over the course of the year, McKee went through 20 pairs of running shoes over some 9,500 miles. When a rare pink iguana was identified on the Galápagos Islands in 2009, scientists feared the species faced a serious risk of extinction. But a recent 10-month expedition by Ecuadorian and American researchers has offered a glimmer of…

“We’ve become accustomed in American politics to a certain level of truth stretching,” said Nicholas Fandos in The New York Times. But even in this post-Trump era of “‘alternative facts,’ it is hard to find a case quite like that of George Santos,” the freshman Republican congressman who seems to have fabricated his entire life story. He lied about graduating from a prestigious private high school and two colleges that have no record of his attendance. He lied about working for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. While running for office in a heavily Jewish district of Long Island, N.Y., Santos, 34, claimed his grandparents were Jews from Ukraine who fled to Brazil to escape the Nazis, but genealogy records show no trace of Jewish heritage. Santos boasted of founding a nonexistent…

Good week for: Hawaiians, who once again lead the national life-expectancy rankings, according to a new study. The average Hawaiian can expect to live 80.7 years—8.8 years longer than the average person in Mississippi, which ranked last. Baby steps, after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene—who has promoted conspiracy theories such as the claim that Jewish-owned “space lasers” cause wildfires—acknowledged that she may have “gotten sucked into some things I had seen on the internet.” Rebranding, with the news that the U.S. State Department will start referring to that nation as “Turkiye.” Professor Erdag Goknar of Duke University explained that the association of the country with the bird was “a denigrating legacy” of the colonial era. Bad week for: Rebranding, after the Jan. 6 committee released an internal White House email relaying then-President Donald Trump’s desire to…