Greetings from Timothy Noah, and happy birthday to my wife, Sarah, born on this day sometime in the second half of the twentieth century.

But enough sentimental nonsense; you want the news. The big story is yesterday’s oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which we can now predict with some confidence will overturn 1973’s Roe v. Wade in part or in whole. Robert Barnes of The Washington Post wrote that the court “appeared likely to uphold a Mississippi law that violates one of the essential holdings of Roe v. Wade” in prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks. (Under Roe and 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, states may not prohibit abortions before fetal viability, which is around 23 weeks.)

The only real suspense, at this point, is whether the high court will toss out Roe completely and let individual states ban abortion outright. Chief Justice John Roberts, “often the most moderate of the conservatives,” said the Mississippi law was not a “dramatic departure.” The court’s other five conservatives, Barnes reports, “indicated they were open to simply getting rid of both” Roe and Planned Parenthood.

For the GOP, a pro-life victory in Dobbs could scramble next year’s midterm elections, Carl Hulse writes in The New York Times, transforming abortion overnight from an issue that energizes Republicans to one that energizes Democrats. “It will certainly motivate our base” if Roe is overturned, said Senator Gary Peters, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Already, abortion is a key issue in Nevada and New Hampshire, where two pro-choice incumbents, Senators Catherine Cortez Masto and Maggie Hassan, are up for reelection. New Hampshire is a notably pro-choice state.

The other big story remains the omicron Covid-19 variant. The first known U.S. case showed up in San Francisco, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Wednesday, in the form of a resident of that city who recently visited South Africa. The patient is self-quarantined, The Wall Street Journal reports, with “mild Covid-19 symptoms that are improving.” All this person’s known contacts since returning have tested negative. The patient was twice-jabbed with the Moderna vaccine but had not received a booster.

President Joe Biden will announce today that insurers must reimburse policyholders for at-home Covid tests going forward and that international travelers to the United States will have to show a negative Covid test taken during the previous 24 hours. (Until now, 72 hours was sufficient.)

Republican politics remain all about Trump, but a rococo doctrinal dispute reminiscent of Stalinist Russia has emerged over whether attacking someone for disloyalty to Trump risks hurting Trump by repeating anti-Trump statements. What’s an apparatchik to do? Politico’s Alex Isenstadt reports that Donald Trump asked David McIntosh, president of the libertarian Club for Growth, to take down TV ads showing Ohio Senate candidate J.D. “Hillbilly Elegy” Vance calling Trump an “idiot,” “noxious,” and “offensive” in 2016, when Vance was a Never Trumper. (Vance has since pledged eternal loyalty to the GOP’s Dear Father.) Trump told McIntosh the ads risked driving down his popularity in Ohio. McIntosh kept the ads on the air, even expanding the $1 million buy by $500,000, but sent Trump a memo reassuring him with poll numbers that the ads had no impact on Trump’s support.

Here at NewRepublic.com, Sam Adler-Bell profiles the conservative “counterrevolutionaries” who seem sometimes to hold the conservative establishment in greater contempt than the liberal left. They’re young; they’re mostly Catholic (converts greatly outnumber “Cradle Catholics”); they gravitate to the Claremont Institute, a California think tank founded by Straussians; and, bizarrely, they don’t talk much about electoral strategy. To them, Donald Trump is at worst a useful idiot. Alex Shephard writes that CNN waited too long to take Chris Cuomo off the air and, when it did, protested that he loved not wisely but too well. In fact, Shephard notes, “He was using his perch as one of the most prominent news anchors in the country to smear victims and influence coverage of his even more powerful brother.” Grace Segers interviews Peter Welch, Vermont’s lone House member and a Democrat who’s running to succeed retiring Senator Pat Leahy. Asked why Vermont has the highest vaccination rate in the country, Welch says: “We, I think, have a citizenry that is respectful of others, where folks want to be safe and careful to protect themselves and their families.” What a bunch of weirdos! And Richard D. Kahlenberg delivers a rave review of Sheryll Cashin’s book White Space, Black Hood, observing that in the geographic isolation of low-income African Americans, “class discrimination overlaps with and compounds racial segregation.”

Arrivederci,
Timothy Noah, staff writer

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Yesterday’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?

Answer: Lyndon Baines Johnson, thirty-sixth president of the United States and predecessor to then-incumbent Richard Nixon. He died at age 64 of a massive heart attack. It was the premature death LBJ had always feared because his father had died of heart failure at 60. It may not have helped that the second he left the White House, literally on Air Force One on the way back to Texas, he took up smoking again. Less than a week later, a Vietnam peace agreement was signed that effectively ended U.S. involvement in the war on which LBJ’s presidency had foundered. Saigon would fall to the North Vietnamese in April 1975, ending the war altogether.

Today’s political history question: On this day in 1823, a president delivered a famous address to Congress. Who was the president, and what did the speech concern?