Hello and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Leigh Ann Caldwell, coming to you on another remarkably busy news day.

President Donald Trump may be inching closer to getting his new Fed chair, but Jerome Powell made it clear today that he’s not ready to leave the stage. Just hours after the Senate Banking Committee advanced Kevin Warsh—whose confirmation had been stalled pending a Justice Department investigation into Powell—the Fed voted to hold interest rates steady, and Powell announced he’ll remain on the board as a governor. Trolling works both ways.

Meanwhile, a feisty Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared before Congress for the first time since the war in Iran began—though he largely stonewalled questions about the war’s duration and objectives. (The main news was the Pentagon C.F.O.’s disclosure that the war had cost $25 billion so far, the first public accounting, surprising lawmakers who expected a higher figure.) Hegseth’s performance may have satisfied his audience of one—the president—but it left Congress, which has to approve his $1.5 trillion budget request, with little to work with. My ever-prescient colleague Julia Ioffe will have more tales from D.O.D. tomorrow.

Elsewhere in Washington, my colleague Abby details the black swan scenario whereby the House could flip to Democrats before the midterms. (We’re just a few accidents, illnesses, deaths, or resignations away…) Up top, I have some insight into why Democrats are reluctant to vote for a FISA extension, the trickle-down impacts from the Supreme Court Voting Rights Act ruling, and an update on Florida’s redistricting effort.

Also mentioned in this issue: Ron DeSantis, Kathy Castor, Brian Nathan, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Mario Diaz Balart, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tony Gonzales, Tom Kean Jr., Kevin Kiley, Eric Swalwell, Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, David Scott, Jim Jeffords and… Agatha Christie.

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The Cloakroom

Goodbye split delegations…: The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act has effectively guaranteed that the redistricting wars won’t end with this cycle. If anything, they’re just beginning—potentially creating an American congressional map filled with single-party states.

Without the requirement to draw majority-minority districts under the V.R.A., Louisiana is poised to eliminate at least one Democratic district, possibly both. Tennessee’s lone Democratic district is likely to disappear as well. Republican legislatures in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi are also likely to redraw their states’ maps, though perhaps not until next cycle because voting has already started or the primary is mere days away. At that point, any state with a partisan trifecta—New York, Illinois, and Maryland on one side, Indiana and New Hampshire on the other—will face renewed pressure to act, even if they resisted redistricting just this year.

The downstream effects could be profound. Consider the Congressional Black Caucus, arguably the most powerful Democratic bloc, built over decades by Black lawmakers after the Voting Rights Act abolished poll taxes and literacy tests. The C.B.C.’s foundation, especially in the South, now looks less secure. Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who has credited the V.R.A. with making his election possible, sees the ruling as a nail in the coffin for the landmark civil rights bill. “A result of this decision is that the partisan actions of bad actors, who right now are trying to marginalize parts of the electorate that they don't want to hear from, just got new tools,” he told me.

Democrats, at least publicly, are not ceding ground. In Florida, as the House voted to advance Gov. Ron DeSantis’s new congressional maps—plans that could erase as many as four Democratic seats—Rep. Kathy Castor struck a defiant note. Her Tampa district has been split into three, yet she says she will run again in what’s now a likely R+10 district she believes is still winnable—she pointed to Democrat Brian Nathan, who won a special election earlier this month in a heavily Republican State Senate district in Tampa. Meanwhile, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz will likely have to run against one of her Democratic colleagues if the DeSantis maps hold. On the House floor, I spotted her in a lengthy conversation with Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, whose district has been drawn slightly less red. Too bad I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

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Kash crunch for FISA: Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, typically renewed by a predictable coalition, has become more contentious this year. Democratic leadership chose not to whip votes for the bill, which finally passed after Speaker Mike Johnson spent weeks accommodating demands from his members to secure passage, including by adding a ban on the Fed using digital currency that Senate leadership said is dead on arrival. Still, Democratic support was notably lower than expected. (In 2024, 147 Democrats voted for an extension, and only 42 Democrats supported it tonight.) The reason? Kash Patel. Among Democrats, trust in the F.B.I. director, whom they view as erratic, is so limited that many are reluctant to extend the government’s surveillance capabilities on his watch. Traditionally, skepticism toward FISA has come from the libertarian right and the progressive left, united by concerns over civil liberties and due process. But now the identity of the F.B.I. director has become a voting issue—something that, not long ago, would have seemed unthinkable.

And now, the main event…

Johnson’s Margin Call

As the House Republican majority continues to dwindle, Hill insiders are contemplating something unprecedented: Could Democrats gain control of Congress before the midterms?

Abby Livingston

Washington has largely accepted the conventional wisdom that Democrats will flip the House in November—the main debate among increasingly giddy Dem operatives is how big the wave will be, and whether they might have a shot at the Senate, too. But lately, the conversation on Capitol Hill has coalesced around another question: Could the House actually flip before November?

It’s not something people like to talk about, given the ghoulish aspects of the topic. Still, a three-vote Republican margin means that it wouldn’t take many members to resign, die, or be incapacitated before Republicans lose their grip on the speaker’s gavel—and the topic has become more salient with the recent disappearance of New Jersey Republican Tom Kean Jr. for unexplained health reasons. Meanwhile, in just the last year, the party has also had three members resign (Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mark Green, and Tony Gonzales) and one member die (Doug LaMalfa). “Everybody’s talking about it, but nobody’s admitting to talking about it,” one House G.O.P. operative told me.

A mid-term flip—as opposed to a midterm flip—would be unprecedented. It would also be, to use a technical term, a mess. There are currently 218 Republicans in the House (including independent Kevin Kiley, who caucuses with them) versus 212 Democrats, with five vacancies—three Democratic and two Republican. Those seats were emptied by a grim combination of scandal (Gonzales, along with Democrats Eric Swalwell and Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick) and death (in the cases of LaMalfa and Democrat David Scott). This translates to a three-vote Republican margin, depending on the day. With special elections at the whim of state governors and political winds, it’s not hard to imagine a world in which that margin could disappear entirely.

There are some on Capitol Hill who dismiss that scenario with an eye roll and call it West Wing fan fic. On the other end of the spectrum are political obsessives who endlessly speculate about the leadership races it would set up, the procedural vehicles related to a change of power, etcetera. “It’s something people here talk about all the time,” said a House Democratic member. Then, of course, there are those who acknowledge the potential for a mid-cycle flip but aren’t wasting their time worrying. “I try not to think about it, because it would be a circus,” said a House Dem chief. A Republican consultant agreed: “I don’t even want to think about this because it’s such a hot potato.”

You might assume Democrats are rooting for this outcome—they’d finally have the power to counter Trump with committee gavels and subpoenas, months earlier than expected. Not exactly. For one thing, they’d inherit the same razor-thin margin and governing headaches that are currently Speaker Mike Johnson’s to deal with. For another, the majority could evaporate just as quickly via another vacancy or special election. As one former House Dem leadership staffer put it, “You have to take the majority by the skin of your ass—and then you have to govern.” Hence, perhaps, why multiple Dems told me they’d rather take the majority the old-fashioned way—at the ballot box.

“All-Out Fucking Chaos”

Not long ago, in the days of more comfortable House margins, vacancies were often an afterthought and rarely decisive. In today’s House, every resignation, scandal, or death lands like a lightning bolt, triggering a flurry of speculation on both sides—What does this do to the numbers?

For instance, a few cycles ago, the fact that Kean hasn’t voted since early March might have gone unnoticed. But given today’s margin, his absence is being treated as an Agatha Christie–level mystery. (Kean has issued a statement saying his doctors expect him to make a full recovery, and that he expects to return to a full schedule soon.) Likewise, when Rep. Scott died, the immediate grief was quickly followed by the colder calculation that his absence gave Republicans a much-needed buffer.

If Republicans have had an insurance policy, it’s that three other elderly Democratic members died early last year, making the Republican whip for the Big Beautiful Bill an easier lift. That sad fact also meant Republican leadership had the flexibility to tolerate a handful of resignations without jeopardizing control. “Maybe we shouldn’t be electing geriatric Democrats because it consistently hurts our margins,” a House Dem operative groused.

Even so, the consensus on the Hill remains that a mid-cycle flip is unlikely. But there is precedent in the Senate. In 2001, as elder Republicans bitterly recall, Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords switched sides to caucus with the Democrats, flipping control of the Senate overnight. “Everything changes,” said the House Republican operative, who was a Senate aide at the time. “It’s an election-year change mid-cycle. So you have like 24 hours as the majority to clean out your desk.” The Republican consultant concurred, predicting that such a scenario would be “all-out fucking chaos.” But, he added, an eventual Democratic takeover is a fait accompli. “They’re gonna get it in January anyway,” he said, a nod to House Democratic midterm momentum. “I don’t know what the difference is.”

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