Good morning from Timothy Noah!

News came this morning that unemployment claims shot up to 286,000 last week, a 55,000 rise over the previous week. It’s another sign that omicron is creating volatility in the job market. Unemployment is at a very low 3.9 percent, and the “quits rate” is at a historic high, but “there is some evidence that the surge in omicron cases has slowed growth in job postings by employers,” reports The Wall Street Journal’s Gabriel T. Rubin, citing the jobs site Indeed.

Joe Biden blurted out at yesterday’s press conference that Vladimir Putin is about to invade Ukraine. “Do I think he’ll test the West, test the United States and NATO, as significantly as he can?” Biden asked. “Yes, I think he will.” This was a classic “Kinsley gaffe”; that is, it met former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley’s definition of a gaffe as an instance when a politician inadvertently speaks the truth. Republican Representative Michael McCaul of Texas called Biden’s remarks “nothing short of a disaster,” even though McCaul surely agrees that Putin is about to invade.

McCaul was especially exercised that Biden suggested (somewhat clumsily, it’s true) that this might not be a full-scale invasion. That, McCaul said, “clearly gave Vladimir Putin the green light to launch a ‘minor incursion.’” But press spokesperson Jennifer Psaki clarified afterward, “If any Russian military forces move across the Ukrainian border, that’s a renewed invasion, and it will be met with a swift, severe, and united response from the United States and our allies.” That didn’t impress Ukraine Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba, who kind of agreed with McCaul. Kuleba told The Wall Street Journal, “Speaking of minor and full incursions or full invasion, you cannot be half-aggressive. You’re either aggressive or you’re not aggressive. We should not give Putin the slightest chance to play with quasi-aggression or small incursion operations.”

The Senate, as expected, failed to overcome a Republican filibuster against the Democrats’ voting rights bill, then failed to alter Senate rules to pass the bill by a simple majority. The rule change required only 50 votes plus a tie-breaker by Vice President Kamala Harris, but Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin refused to support it. But Politico’s Marianne LeVine and Burgess Everett report that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made progress of a sort in persuading Senators Mark Kelly, Dianne Feinstein, and Chris Coons to suspend or eliminate the filibuster. The filibuster clearly is going the way of the dodo. But its extinction won’t likely come soon enough to help Biden.

The Supreme Court rejected former President Donald Trump’s ridiculous request to block release of White House records about the January 6 Capitol insurrection. The only dissenter was Justice Clarence Thomas, who said he would have granted Trump’s request but didn’t explain why. This is your periodic reminder that “executive privilege” was a legal concept invented by the nonlawyer Dwight Eisenhower when he was president, probably while he was practicing his golf swing. The phrase itself wasn’t coined until a few years after that, by Eisenhower’s assistant attorney general for the civil division, George Cochran Doub, whose contribution to constitutional jurisprudence didn’t rate a mention in his 1981 obituary.

At NewRepublic.com, Walter Shapiro assesses Biden’s performance at yesterday’s press conference: “shrewd observations, occasional regrets, apologies for ‘talking too much,’ and more candor than is normal from a sitting president.” Jan Dutkiewicz ponders, after the first successful transplant of a pig’s heart into a human patient, the ethics of “a standing reserve of genetically modified animals bred as repositories of organs for human use.” And Matt Ford writes that Donald Trump’s false valuations of his properties to banks, tax collectors, and business partners uncovered by New York Attorney General Letitia James’s investigation aren’t exactly surprising. “The only question,” he notes, “is whether Trump will face any consequences.”

 Auf wiedersehen,
 —Timothy Noah, staff writer

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Yesterday’s political question: The cloture vote ending debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most dramatic filibuster shutdown in Senate history. After decades of trying, liberals were able to silence the segregationist Southern bloc and guide a major civil rights bill to final passage. It was all the more remarkable because back in those days, you needed 67 votes to end cloture, not today’s 60. Which senator provided the sixty-seventh vote?

Bonus question: One senator, Democrat Clair Engle of California, was incapacitated by a brain tumor and unable to speak; when the clerk called his name, what gesture did he make to indicate his “aye” vote?

Answers: Republican Senator John “Whispering Willie” Williams of Delaware—so nicknamed because he spoke in a very quiet voice—cast the sixty-seventh vote. Engle pointed to his eye to indicate “aye.”

Today’s political 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?

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.