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Abby Livingston

Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Abby Livingston. It’s already becoming a long December on the Hill, with Democrats battling for leadership roles along generational lines and the collapse of a spending bill that could result in a shutdown. (For those who thought the 118th Congress was bananas… buckle up for the 119th.) Meanwhile, in tonight’s issue, a close look at the latest drama surrounding Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: her failed challenge to the 74-year-old Gerry Connolly to lead the House Oversight Committee, why the seemingly resounding 131-to-84 defeat is not as devastating as it seems, and, of course, the Nancy Pelosi of it all… But first…

Elon spikes the spending bill: The 118th Congress really couldn’t go quietly into that good night. The term that included everything from Kevin McCarthy’s defenestration, to the misadventures of George Santos, to a cabinet impeachment no one remembers, to the central show of Trump’s transition back to power, is on track to go out with yet another bang or two. To wit: This afternoon, Elon Musk, who’s got money, power, and proximity to President-elect Trump, started whipping against the spending bill that was supposed to keep the government open through the first two months of Trump’s second term. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” he wrote on X. Within hours, Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance themselves condemned the bill, which the House G.O.P. then duly tanked—piling the immediate possibility of a government shutdown atop the already high-pressure negotiations over the funding measure. Shutdowns—and attempts to avoid them—are now increasingly likely to bedevil Trump’s ostensible First 100 Days honeymoon period. And then there’s the fact that the House Ethics Committee is reportedly going to release their investigation of Matt Gaetz over allegations of potential sex trafficking, which he again denied forcefully this morning.
🎧Dan Pfeiffer on mystery drones & Resistance 2.0: So what do you think of the mystery drones dotting the night sky above New Jersey? On today’s episode of Impolitic, Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer dodges the question before making the persuasive case to my partner John Heilemann that the government’s failure to address the mystery is emblematic of the larger abdication of responsibility that has allowed Trump present himself as if he’s been president since November 5. It’s another great episode, and you can listen to the entire thing by clicking here.

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And now, here’s a quick excerpt of my partner Dylan Byers’s In the Room email regarding the latest shoes to drop in the Washington Post executive editor drama. (Make sure you never miss his emails by signing up here…)

Dylan Byers

The Matt Murray Potential Surprise

Down in D.C., The Washington Post spent Tuesday evening doling out awards to its journalists—a historically joyous, navel-gazing holiday tradition, albeit one that was considerably less enjoyable this year. The annual ceremony, awarding both the Ben Bradlee Award for Courage in Journalism and the Eugene Meyer Awards, was subsumed by the growing miasma of incompetence and bickering. To wit: There was the departure of Matea Gold, the veteran managing editor who is decamping to The New York Times after being passed over during C.E.O. Will Lewis’s grand search for a new executive editor. And then there’s the general malaise brought on by years of declining readership, revenue losses, and managerial controversy. Somewhere, Fred Ryan is pouring himself a stiff drink in a tartan jacket and expressing gratitude that he isn’t cleaning up the mess. By the time Posties had gathered on Tuesday afternoon, sans Lewis, their discontent had been exacerbated by an item in Axios alleging that several of Lewis’s top candidates to run the paper, including the Times’s Cliff Levy and former Post editor Anne Kornblut, had withdrawn from consideration due to reservations about Lewis’s “foggy and uninspiring” vision. It’s still not entirely clear whether Levy privately expressed his reservations before Will might have conveyed his own, but a bad situation had once again gotten worse. As I understand it, many of the folks Will might have been able to recruit for the position (Cliff, Matea, etcetera) weren’t the ones he really wanted, and the ones he wanted weren’t really interested. In any event, this all made for a particularly depressing state of affairs amidst the mistletoe and holly. And the evening’s festivities truly hit rock bottom, as my buddy Oliver Darcy has reported, when veteran sports columnist Sally Jenkins said in prepared remarks, “This newsroom has been fractured. What I want for Christmas is, I want this place whole again,” then proceeded to tear up along with other colleagues. Increasingly, Lewis’s critics fear that he doesn’t actually have a vision for the paper. In private conversations, however, he has described a plan that sounds like a more refined version of the one he laid out shortly after his arrival more than a year ago. His strategy, as articulated in these conversations, is to make the Post the news source for “all of America,” with a high-low approach that simultaneously draws elite readers while making derivative content more interesting and less partisan. According to this vision, the Post will have three legs: a main newsroom, led by the yet-to-be-determined executive editor; the high-end, Politico Pro-style, Marty Kady-led subscription project called “Post Intelligence”; and that infamous “third newsroom,” dubbed “Post Ventures,” which will oversee new initiatives and acquisitions. Continue reading online.

And now, A.O.C.…

A.O.C.’s Silver Linings Playbook

House Democrats, guided by the long arm of Nancy Pelosi, moved to block Ocasio-Cortez’s ascent on Oversight—a job that would have put her front and center on C-SPAN. But the left’s millennial icon is playing a much longer game.

Abby Livingston

In the end, the generational upheaval ripping through the Democratic caucus stopped short of ushering Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into leadership. For the past several weeks, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries stood back and allowed junior members to challenge the old guard for senior committee assignments. Alas, A.O.C., who squared off against 74-year-old Gerry Connolly for the ranking member post at Oversight, didn’t have an ally in Nancy Pelosi, who spent the weekend rolling calls—still operating behind the scenes even as she recovered from emergency hip replacement surgery in Germany—to ensure that Ocasio-Cortez lost. Of course, Pelosi wasn’t the only Democrat invested in preventing the media-savvy, 35-year-old Squad member from gaining an even bigger platform. As it turns out, there are many caucus members who still resent Ocasio-Cortez for her history of clashing with popular colleagues. Add to that the free-floating, post-election anxiety about the viability of A.O.C.’s progressive style of politics. Indeed, the more moderate members of the party I spoke to expressed concern that elevating A.O.C. to Oversight—a role that would put her front and center on C-SPAN and the nightly news—would not help Dems with their much-needed brand rebuild. On Monday, she lost a vote of the party steering committee. On Tuesday, she lost the vote among the full Democratic caucus, 131 to 84.

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Meanwhile, House Democrats voted 121 to 91 to approve a bid by A.O.C.’s largely anonymous 2018 classmate, Minnesota’s Angie Craig, to depose 79-year-old David Scott as ranking member of Agriculture. Craig’s ascension represents a win for a younger generation in Congress, especially as the party seeks to elevate scrappier, more aggressive talent—like Jamie Raskin, who is taking over as ranking on Judiciary—over the old guard. But it also reflects a debate among Democrats over which type of talent is best positioned to lead the resistance from the minority. Craig, a moderate who has been ranked among the most bipartisan members of Congress, won her swing district in a landslide. In short, she’s precisely the kind of Democrat that some in the party want to represent them in the Trump era. The divergent fates of Ocasio-Cortez and Craig also illustrate the enduring truism that it takes more than internet clout, or movement support, to take power on the Hill. (This is a bicameral and bipartisan principle, as the MAGA wing learned when John Thune bested their preferred candidate, Rick Scott, for Senate majority leader.) And unlike A.O.C., Craig is widely popular in the caucus and is strategic in picking fights. “Part of it is getting your relationships right,” a former member involved in the races told me. The endless first-term fighting between A.O.C. and Pelosi also alienated the many, many members who’ve supported Pelosi for years. A.O.C.’s sparring with Jeffries in that same era also stirred fears among rank-and-file colleagues that she would support primary challengers against them. That’s not to say Craig lacks boldness: She was a key figure in the Capitol Hill effort to get Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential election last summer, when many of her colleagues (A.O.C. included) were either backing him or lying low. And in challenging Scott, she was once again saying the quiet part out loud, voicing her concerns about the septuagenarian’s health at a time when most of her colleagues were only doing so privately. Craig has thus limited her battles to the ones where the caucus was essentially behind her—even if other members lacked the will to follow through themselves.

The Arc of A.O.C.

While Ocasio-Cortez’s defeat appears resounding, it’s still a much better result than almost anyone predicted. Over the past six years, A.O.C. has matured immensely from the bridge-burning firebrand who stormed Pelosi’s office (after ousting the beloved Joe Crowley, who might otherwise have been speaker by now) to a sort of elder statesman among her millennial cohort, and certainly the most pragmatic of her fellow Squad members. The allies she’s gained are also influential.

Before the vote, three members appealed to colleagues on her behalf, including Pat Ryan, a moderate Democrat representing a swing district in New York, and Nydia Velázquez, another fellow New Yorker, first elected in 1992, who is about as establishment as it gets. During A.O.C.’s rebellious early days on the Hill, Velázquez instructed her on the merits of building relationships, and in A.O.C.’s major floor speeches, Velázquez is often seated right behind her younger colleague, squarely in the frame of the C-SPAN camera. But some members still live in fear of her megaphone, and the fundraising power she can throw behind primary challengers. While A.O.C.’s primary endorsements against colleagues are rare, they are potent—Henry Cuellar nearly lost reelection in 2022 to an A.O.C.-backed insurgent. Others still haven’t forgotten how she once took on the D.C.C.C. for playing hardball against consultants who planned to work for candidates challenging sitting House Democrats. (In her Monday presentation before the steering committee, which makes leadership recommendations before the entire caucus votes on candidates, Ocasio-Cortez reportedly signaled that she was reconsidering supporting challenges to colleagues.) Even so, the ascension of A.O.C. to a leadership role on a top committee feels inevitable (if she doesn’t ditch the House to make a statewide run first). She’s already high-ranking on Oversight and has a spot on Natural Resources, but it’s no secret that she’s long wanted to specialize on climate change over at Energy and Commerce. She now comes to that conversation with demonstrated support from a large number of colleagues; has her own seniority entering her fourth term; and was a dutiful soldier on the 2024 campaign trail, delivering a well-received D.N.C. speech and paying dues to the D.C.C.C. She is now, in short, exactly the type of member who makes it onto a committee like Energy and Commerce. Meanwhile, A.O.C.’s youth will, in the coming years, morph into her greatest political strength—ironically, thanks in part to House Dems’ current seniority system. After all, if A.O.C. decides to make a career in the House, she will already have 10 terms under her belt by the time she’s in her late 40s, when most in her age cohort will be coming in as freshmen. Don’t forget, she’ already a senior member on Oversight, just six years into her House service. Turnover on that committee is high; as colleagues gave up their slots there for Appropriations or Ways and Means, A.O.C. continued to move up the ranks. This positions her to take leadership there in her early 40s if not sooner. She will thereby tread the most reliable path to power in Washington: outlasting your haters.

Puck senior political correspondent Tara Palmeri grapples with the aftermath of what may be the most chaotic and consequential presidential election cycle of our lifetime. With 15 years covering politics, Tara speaks with the smartest political minds to discuss what’s happening behind the scenes in Washington, D.C., from the campaign trail to the Capitol.

Ace media reporter Dylan Byers lets readers into his notebook as he reports on the biggest stories (and egos) in the industry.

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