Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Abby Livingston, back with another Sunday supplement detailing everything you need to know about the inside conversations transfixing the Hill and what to watch for in the week ahead.

In today’s issue, news and notes on the state of Trump’s nominations, the Sunday show debate over Biden considering preemptive pardons, and who’s up and who’s down in the new Congress. Also, if you missed my conversation with Puck’s executive editor Ben Landy on The Powers That Be yesterday, we discussed the V.C. players in Trump’s inner circle, the crypto money that fueled the election, whether lawmakers will back off regulation of Big Tech, and more. You can find that episode here.

Let’s get into it…

The A.O.C. gambit, in particular, is a source of immense intrigue on the Hill. The third-term celebrity congresswoman seemed to be evolving into a caucus team player after openly feuding with then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi during her first term. She paid D.C.C.C. dues for the first time this past cycle (only after Pelosi turned over her political operation to Hakeem Jeffries) and was a dutiful soldier in Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. But her insurgent ranking bid has put her once again crosswise with Pelosi, who is reportedly working against her. Axios further reported that Pelosi is making calls on behalf of Costa, a fellow Californian. The support for Costa and Connolly is consistent with an effort to preserve the seniority system in committee chair selections.

Sure, it’s been five years since the last major blowup between Pelosi and A.O.C., back in the early Squad-vs.-establishment days. Back then, Pelosi dismissed the freshmen’s “public whatever and their Twitter world” in an interview with Maureen Dowd, prompting A.O.C. to hit back (on Twitter, naturally). But the resurgent discord is simply nature’s obedience to two laws of political motion. One: Pelosi has the longest memory in modern politics. Two: Anytime a conflict spills out into a Maureen Dowd column, there’s no going back.

In any case, reports of Pelosi’s political maneuvering were supplanted a day later by the news that she’d taken a hard spill in Luxembourg, which necessitated immediate hip replacement surgery at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, an Army post in Germany. Senator-elect Adam Schiff, a close Pelosi ally, told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he’d spoken with Pelosi’s daughter, Christine Pelosi, who’d said her mother was “recovering from the surgery well.” Schiff was confident that Pelosi, “as strong and as tough as she is,” would be “back on her feet soon.”

Just how soon was the question percolating through the Acela-corridor holiday party circuit this weekend—and whether the fall might inhibit Pelosi’s mission to whip committee votes over the next week. Committee contenders will make presentations to the steering committee Monday afternoon. Steering will then vote on a recommendation, and the caucus will likely vote on Tuesday.

This week will also likely be the last time the 118th Congress meets ahead of the January 3 swearing-in day, and a last major to-do list item for both chambers is to thrash out a spending bill that will last until March. (This 118th Congress, with the Freedom Caucus rebellion that ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy and left the House speakerless for weeks, was one for the books.)

But so far, there’s been less concerted pushback to Kennedy’s nomination than to Pete Hegseth, or to Matt Gaetz before him. Bernie Sanders, when asked Sunday on Meet the Press whether he’d back Kennedy, emphasized the necessity of vaccines, but implied they might find common cause on processed food. He didn’t commit to voting one way or another when pressed, telling Kristen Welker, “We’re going to have a hearing on it, and it’s premature to say how I will vote on him, or, I think, how anybody should vote.”

Perhaps Washington is too preoccupied with Donald Trump’s other, even more controversial nominees. Indeed, on the Sunday show rotation this weekend, nearly every newsmaker interview focused on Tulsi Gabbard (nominated to serve as director of national intelligence), Hegseth (secretary of defense), and Kash Patel (director of the F.B.I.). Notably, on Fox News Sunday, North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis—among a handful of closely watched potential swing voters in the Senate—had a message for third-party groups pressuring Republican senators to vote “yes”: Back off. “If people want to play the outside game, then they run a lot of risks,” he said. “Four votes are all it’s going to take to kill a nomination here.”

Tillis was particularly incensed by the MAGA pressure campaign targeting his Republican colleague Joni Ernst, a combat veteran and sexual assault survivor at the epicenter of the Hegseth fight. “Anyone who wants to challenge her in a primary for being thoughtful needs to be held accountable for that sort of garbage,” Tillis said. “The reality is, Joni and all of us are just looking for a good, solid case to carry forward to the floor. And Joni asking questions and appearing to be objective with Pete is just fine with me.”

In a walk-off appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, retiring senator Mitt Romney conceded that some of Trump’s nominees are “an unusual collection of individuals” but called for deference—up to a point. “Not the people I would have chosen, but I lost. He won,” Romney said. “Now, the Senate has a responsibility to make sure that these people are legitimate, that there’s no skeleton that could be an embarrassment to them or the country, and to also determine if they’re qualified for the position that they’ve been nominated to.”

Two of Trump’s most vocal Senate allies were happy to disclose how they’d vote, however, with Lindsey Graham telling Meet the Press that he’s a “yes” on Hegseth (“unless something I don’t know about comes out”), and Eric Schmitt singing the praises of Patel (“the right man”) and Gabbard (“a patriot”) on This Week.

Democrat Adam Schiff then made the case for the “no” votes, telling Stephanopoulos that Patel was a “conspiracy theorist” and a “sycophant” and “someone who will do whatever dirty work the president wants him to do.” As for Gabbard, Schiff questioned her experience and judgment on Syria and Ukraine, especially given the then-congresswoman’s surreptitious meet and greet with now-deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2017, after Assad had used chemical weapons on his own people. “Someone who had shown that kind of poor judgment is not necessarily someone you want advising this president,” said Schiff.

Of course, the prospect of politically motivated prosecutions—what Trump and his allies have characterized as a revenge tour—was particularly salient this week, amid reports that the Biden administration has discussed offering preemptive blanket pardons to likely Trump targets. Schiff, who participated in the January 6 investigation himself, is one such potential target, but said he believed pardons would be “unnecessary” because the committee’s work was all above board. He also warned that “giving preemptive blanket pardons on the way out of an administration I think is a precedent we don’t want to set.”

Romney, too, is a possible target—he’s the only Republican senator who voted to impeach Trump twice. But he told Jake Tapper he wasn’t “particularly worried about criminal investigations,” musing that Trump’s they-oughta-be-in-jail rhetoric might just be hyperbole. He then made a better-angels appeal. “I think President Trump is likely to try and focus on the future,” he added. “People who committed crimes, I’m sure, will be prosecuted. But I think that’s few and far between.”

Meanwhile, the fallout from Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter continues, even within his own party. Sanders called it “kind of a dangerous” precedent “as a very wide-open pardon which could under different circumstances lead to problems in terms of future presidents.” And on Face the Nation, Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar said “this whole process cries out for reform because otherwise you undermine the justice system. … Let’s at least look at these on a factual basis and a risk basis, instead of just in the middle of the night a month before a president leaves.”