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Donald Trump is gone. But fringe ideas that he endorsed are still finding representation in Washington, and Republicans once again are facing a test of what the party will and won’t tolerate.
Tonight, the House voted to strip freshman Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments over her past racist, anti-Semitic, and conspiracist comments.
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Greene is just a symptom of what ails the party. David A. Graham sums up the GOP’s dilemma: “How do you hold one individual accountable for repugnant things you’d previously decided to indulge as a route to victory?”
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The GOP has been here before. Ronald Brownstein compares it to the far-right John Birch Society of the 1960s. “There were a lot more Republican leaders, and their constituents, who attempted to push back then than there are now,” one political historian told him.
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Josh Hawley is now the most hated man in Washington. The Missouri senator, once the golden boy of elite conservatives, “became the avatar of the congressional insurrection,” Emma Green writes.
One question, answered: Where is the flu this year? That virus has all but disappeared, Katherine J. Wu reports.
This winter has, so far, been the quietest flu season in recent memory, and the perks are clear. Fewer flu cases mean fewer deaths, fewer occupied hospital beds, and fewer overtaxed health-care workers, caregivers, and laboratory employees—a welcome respite for a country still in the coronavirus’s grip. But the flu’s absence is also unsettling. Without flu cases to study, researchers have been starved of data crucial for developing vaccines and forecasting the next outbreak. Flu viruses haven’t gone extinct. They’re temporarily in hiding. And no one’s quite sure when, or how, they will return.
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