Greetings from staff writer Timothy Noah!

Happy 266th birthday to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, happy 137th birthday to Jerome Kern, happy 172nd birthday to Samuel Gompers, happy 186th birthday to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who gave us masochism, and happy 163rd birthday to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, the closest thing we have to a historical antecedent to Donald Trump.

It’s morning in America. The economy grew 5.7 percent in 2021, the fastest rate since 1984, when President Ronald Reagan ran for reelection with that slogan and crushed Walter Mondale. So maybe things aren’t so awful for President Joe Biden, after all. Growth during the final quarter was an especially robust 6.9 percent on an annualized basis. The reason for the rapid growth, of course, was the devastating impact of Covid-19 the year before. Also, jobless claims, which had been rising in recent weeks, fell by 30,000. The stock market’s been having a rough week, but stock futures tied to the S&P 500 rose 0.5 percent this morning in reaction to the good news.

Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement, to be announced officially today, gives Democrats their first Supreme Court nomination since President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland, whom the Republican-controlled Senate refused to consider in 2016 because a presidential election was, uh, eight months away. (Garland is, of course, now attorney general.) The Republicans didn’t even pretend to be consistent four years later, when they jammed Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett through the Senate with the election one week away and balloting already begun. The last Supreme Court justice placed on the court by a Democratic president was Elena Kagan. That was 12 long years ago.

Biden promised in his 2020 campaign that he would nominate a Black woman to the high court, and according to Adam Liptak in The New York Times, speculation has focused on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Justice Leondra R. Kruger of the California Supreme Court. Also under consideration, per Jess Braven in The Wall Street Journal, are federal Judge Julianna Michelle Childs of South Carolina, appellate Judge Candace Rae Jackson-Akiwumi of Chicago, and appellate Judge Eunice Cheryl Lee of New York. The Washington Post has a handy guide to some of the potential nominees.

As recently as October 2016, Democrats were looking forward to their first Supreme Court majority since 1970. Sure, Mitch McConnell was blocking Garland, but Hillary Clinton was going to win, right? Instead, Trump won without a popular-vote plurality, then pushed through an improbable three Supreme Court nominations. Now the prospect of a high court that’s as mainstream as the Republican-dominated one in place for nearly five decades after 1970 is nowhere in sight. Replacing Breyer won’t change the balance. Indeed, writing in The Washington Post, columnist Ruth Marcus makes it sound like kind of a lousy gig. “A younger justice will be there for decades,” she writes, “but it may take that long for her to be able to write, or even join, a majority opinion in a fiercely contested area of jurisprudence. She will occupy a seat at the pinnacle of government power, yet she will be in many ways powerless, with colleagues who know what they think and who are unlikely to be swayed.”

Whomever Biden nominates, it’s a given that not a single Republican senator will vote “aye.” That shouldn’t matter because under Senate rules, a Supreme Court nomination can’t be filibustered. But writing in The Washington Post, Michael Scherer and Seung Min Kim, citing an unnamed Senate Democratic aide, point out that Republicans still have some avenues to create mischief: “The Judiciary Committee—like all other committees—is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, meaning that GOP senators would hold more power than a minority party usually would to gum up the works, such as by more easily forcing delays in committee hearings and meetings.”

For a change of pace, check out Garry Wills’s piece in The New York Review of Books about efforts to make a saint out of Dorothy Day, heroic founder of the Catholic Worker movement. It isn’t a new idea, but Wills thinks it’s a bad one, because “she is larger than the figures who wind their way through the miniaturizing process of canonization.” Day didn’t want it; she said it would trivialize her. Wills, a former seminarian and a devoted Roman Catholic, is savagely funny about the Church’s saint-making apparatus, which has been unusually active in recent decades, likening the cry of “find me miracles” to Donald Trump’s cry of “find me votes.” Oof!

Today at NewRepublic.com, Steven Rosenfeld pays tribute to the “Audit Guys,” three retired election technologists who successfully held to account the pro-Trump Cyber Ninjas, in the firm’s dubious “forensic audit” of the 2020 election in Arizona. And Grace Segers considers Mitt Romney’s compromise plan to expand the child tax credit, which is decently generous but requires the elimination of various existing supports for low-income people, including much of the Earned Income Tax Credit and all of TANF, the successor welfare program to AFDC.

Over and out,
—Tim Noah, staff writer

Every day, our journalists are exposing the right’s assaults on our democracy—and pushing the Democrats to go bold to preserve the republic. Here’s a special offer from The New Republic so you won’t miss their scoops and sharp analysis.

Yesterday’s political geography question: Working around clockwise from the bottom left, which countries border Ukraine? Hint: There are seven! Plus one body of water; what is it?

Answer: Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Belarus, Russia. The body of water is the Black Sea.

Today’s political question: Stephen Breyer, a hopeless anglophile who married the daughter of a British viscount, famously baffled an American attorney appearing before the court in 2012 by telling him, “I think I have to say that you are on a weak wicket.”

It wasn’t too hard to figure out Breyer’s figurative meaning: He meant the lawyer was making a weak argument. But Breyer’s literal meaning was harder to grasp if you weren’t English. What game was Breyer referring to, and what is a wicket? (Excluded from play are all citizens of and immigrants from the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth countries.)