Until perhaps as recently as yesterday the assumption was that the current run-up of cases, especially in the Northeast, is actually still Delta. Omicron is still to come. That no longer appears to be the case. We don’t know for certain yet because we don’t have the scope and speed of genomic sequencing that would allow us to know definitively. But the assumption now is that we’re already here, in Omicron. Almost two years into this pandemic we have managed to be at least partly caught off guard by another blowup of the disease.

No overarching Jan. 6 news today but a lot of incremental developments over the last 24 hours to catch up on, in no particular order:

Here is a topic I don’t see enough discussion of. We hear a lot today (for good reason) that voting rights and the protection of democracy is the issue. Social spending, climate, immigration, infrastructure … they’re all important but they all rest on having a working democracy where voting determines who runs the government. All true. But the laws we’re actually talking about, the ones that are written and ready to pass (if Sinema and Manchin would let them come to a vote) or even in concept don’t actually address the main issue that has everyone’s attention. They’re critical. Don’t get me wrong. But they don’t actually address the catalog of situations in which you hold a vote, count the votes and then simply set the votes aside if you don’t like the result.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the seeming “punt” of the reconciliation bill and how Democrats can still generate forward momentum.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

TPM Reader TD fled the country under Trump and isn’t coming back anytime soon:

Hi, Josh. I agree with your post. The country’s in a bad way, and Dems generally and Biden specifically need to find a better way to talk about it. I wanted to add my thoughts about where we are, how we got here, and where we’re going.

TPM Reader PT checks in on Manchin, BBB, and the current swoon:

For pretty much the entire time of the Biden Administration legislative activity, I’ve been of the opinion that the whole issue of the BBB was best understood as a kind of culture war. The problem that the Manchin caucus really has with the BBB is that it represents a Democratic Party in which the moderate / conservative / Manchin caucus is not firmly in the driver seat all the time, for all things.