Good morning and TGIF!

I’m staff writer Grace Segers, and I’m here to talk about the word chunks. Unlike moist, it isn’t a comically uncomfortable word, but there’s something unsettling about it. It seems innocuous, but the more you think about it, or say it, chunks becomes ever more distasteful.

President Joe Biden brought the word chunks into the discourse on Wednesday, when he suggested that the Build Back Better Act could be reduced to its component parts. “I’m confident we can get pieces, big chunks of the Build Back Better law signed into law,” Biden said. But breaking the bill up into chunks—you’re getting sick of that word, aren’t you?—would kind of defeat the purpose of attempting to pass it through the reconciliation process.

Democrats can’t get support from Republicans on any of these provisions, which is why they attempted to bundle all of their priorities into the Build Back Better Act. If they tried to do a separate bill on, say, universal pre-K, they’d need support from 10 Republicans along with all Democrats.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested that the president meant that the majority of the Build Back Better Act—chunks, if you will—could be included in the revised version of the bill. “‘Chunks’ is an interesting word,” Pelosi said at her weekly press conference on Thursday. “What the president calls ‘chunks,’ I hope would be a major bill going forward. It may be more limited, but it is still significant.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki later clarified that Biden was “talking about getting a big chunk, as much as you can get done” through reconciliation. This leaves the question of what small chunks will be left on the cutting board. Biden acknowledged Wednesday that the expanded child tax credit may be one of them, despite data showing that the credit reduced child poverty by nearly 30 percent. Senator Joe Manchin, who is not a fan of the credit, told reporters that negotiations with the White House on Build Back Better will be “starting from scratch.” With that prognostication, we can expect the negotiations on what’s in and out to take a good, er, chunk of time.

Today at NewRepublic.com, you can read more about chunks with my piece on what comes next for the Build Back Better Act. Dan Strauss and I wrote our first in a recurring series of recaps on what happened in the House select committee on January 6. Alex Shephard explains that the demise in bipartisanship is actually a good thing, and Marion Renault digs deep into widespread pandemic apathy. “In this new era, we are not only tired of endless suffering; we are fatigued by our own fatigue. We are deadened to death itself,” Renault writes. Girl, same.

Cheers to the freakin’ weekend,

—Grace Segers, staff writer

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Yesterday’s question: East Germany became the first former Soviet satellite to join NATO when it was absorbed by West Germany in 1990. What’s the most recent former Soviet satellite to join NATO?

Answer: The most recent former Soviet satellite to join NATO is North Macedonia, in 2020. North Macedonia, which before 2019 was known simply as Macedonia—the name was changed to settle a dispute with neighboring Greece—was, during the Soviet era, part of Yugoslavia. 

Yesterday’s bonus question: Before German reunification, what had been the most recent country to join NATO? Hint: This was in 1982. It was the first NATO expansion since West Germany joined in 1955.

Answer: Spain.

Today’s question: We all know the story of Aaron Burr shooting Alexander Hamilton in a duel, but that’s not the only exciting political duel in American history. Who is the only person to have been killed in a duel while he was a sitting senator?