Hello there,

Today’s main event unfolds one block east of the Capitol on First Street Northeast, where the Supreme Court justices will hear arguments on the Mississippi abortion law, which will have them considering whether to overturn Roe v. Wade. People will be watching in particular to see what kinds of questions are asked by Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump’s three appointments to the court. The general betting I’ve seen is that if Roe is to survive, it will be because Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s three liberals because they weren’t quite ready to undo a 50-year-old precedent that has the support of a very solid majority of Americans.

On that point: Gallup’s polling has basically been steady since 1989. Support for keeping Roe has ranged from the high 50s to the mid-60s, and support for overturning it has generally been in the high 20s to low 30s (the numbers from this June were 58 percent keep, 32 percent overturn). Everybody says that Roberts is a political animal and a poll reader and would not set the court against public opinion like that. I wonder if he has that kind of control over the three Trump appointees.

And if you read one opinion column today, by all means make it this one by Michele Goodwin, a law prof at the University of California, Irvine. Her father raped and impregnated her when she was just 12. That’s all I’ll say here. It’s a harrowing tale and a reminder that the morality of abortion is something that assumes many forms and is far more complex than right-to-lifers allow.

A suspect was arrested Tuesday night in the Michigan high school shooting, a 15-year-old male sophomore at the school, where he killed three and injured several others. His name hasn’t been released, and no motive is known. His weapon was a 9 mm Sig Sauer semiautomatic handgun that his father had bought four days earlier. I’m interested in learning more about the circumstances under which Dad bought the gun, and why he thought it was a good idea to leave this weapon and a few 15-round magazines lying around the house unlocked. 

On days of shootings like this, I always make it a point to check in on the NRA website, specifically its page that updates readers on “gun freedom” developments across the various states. They never comment on these shootings, of course, or if they do, it’s to deflect blame elsewhere. But mostly you’ll see, grimly, that they’re bragging about various bills advancing in state legislatures—and they have a lot to brag about.

What’s up with Kevin McCarthy and that nutty House Republican Caucus? The main takeaway of the last 24 hours is that Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a tweet calling her Republican colleague Nancy Mace “trash” because she supports a rape and incest exception on abortion and wants to see her primaried. Mace actually dropped the f-bomb to reporters talking about MTG. McCarthy is supposedly trying to smooth things over behind the scenes. This means, odds are, that he’ll throw Mace overboard as he did Liz Cheney. It’s a nuthouse. And yet Democrats can’t seem to make any political hay out of it.

At NewRepublic.com, we give you a smart Alex Shephard take on Kyle Rittenhouse’s appalling victory/martyr tour. Rittenhouse’s point: “People should really be out marching for Kyle Rittenhouse, not victims of police brutality.” Daniel Strauss delivers some inside reporting on intra-Democratic debates about how they should sell Build Back Better (assuming it passes the Senate); be sure to read down to the quote that’ll make you spit out your coffee. Abdul El-Sayed explains how we can do better in response to omicron than we did delta. And Melody Schreiber speaks to a public health official in South Africa about how the omicron variant, and the Western response, look from there.

Thanks for reading,

Michael Tomasky, editor

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 history question: On this date in 1965, a book hit the stores that was one of the most famous nonfiction books of the decade. It instantly became a bestseller, and it resulted in vast changes in government policy and in one large American industry. What was the book, and who was the author?

Answer: Unsafe at Any Speed, by Ralph Nader. He changed the automotive industry in profound ways. Incidentally, the book grew out of an article describing Nader’s concerns about the industry in … The New Republic. You can read about that here.

Today’s political history question: Roe v. Wade was decided on January 22, 1973. It was front-page news across the country the next day—but it wasn’t necessarily the lead story. That’s because someone, a really prominent someone, died the day Roe was decided. Who was that someone?