Hello and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, I’m Tara Palmeri. In tonight’s edition, notes on the chatter under the Dome as Kevin McCarthy watches the chaos unfold… indulging in some schadenfreude, sinking his teeth into future leadership, biding his time, and plausibly indulging the fantasy of a white-knight return as yet another would-be House Speaker fails to unify the conference.

But first, a dispatch from Abby Livingston on the House speaker race…

In the past, almost no matter the circumstances—even an insurrection—House Republican leaders have always been able to patch things together and move forward after the dust settles. But this time around, the wounds among the rank-and-file are deeper than they’ve ever been, and there are no leaders left to do the mending. Herewith, three reasons it may be difficult to put these pieces back together:

• They’re running out of bodies: In just three weeks, Republicans have taken out an entire generation of House G.O.P. leadership. Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise and Jordan—the nerve centers of strategy and fundraising within the party—were all ascendant prior to this month, and will almost certainly emerge from this crisis diminished. (Although, as Tara notes below, McCarthy may have a trick up his sleeve.) While they may continue to hold positions of stature within the party, their records are now forever blemished. What’s more, this nascent power vacuum has laid bare the fact that the next generation of contenders are either not ready to lead, or that they recognize (perhaps wisely) the utter futility of running at this point.

• The campaign trail will create more chaos: Reports emerging from the House G.O.P. conference meetings describe a scene not unlike an unsupervised daycare—screaming, lunging, insults, etcetera. At the moment, the consequences of a speakerless Congress may remain intangible to the public. But election season is just around the corner, and the chaos will become increasingly difficult to mask.

  To wit: Will the Republicans manage to host a skirmish-less convention next summer in Milwaukee? Will the state conventions in the lead-up to the national convention devolve into brawls? And are these fights getting so ugly that we might actually see Republican members endorse against colleagues in next year’s primaries?

  On Thursday afternoon, a Republican opposition researcher told me that his firm had never received so many requests for “oppo books” at this point in the election season. He suggested this was in part due to the George Santos scandal, in which an unvetted candidate slipped through the process—and that it’s also likely a warning sign that there will be more House Republican primaries than usual next year.

• Leadership has alienated key players: Naturally, the madness at the top has trickle-down effects for the entire conference. Take Kay Granger: first elected in 1996, she worked her way up through the Republican ranks before becoming the top Republican on the Appropriations committee in 2019, repeatedly beating back Trump-y primary challenges. Then she raised a pile of money for the N.R.C.C. to help win the majority—which finally happened in 2022, when she at last got her gavel.

  But it’s a finite chairmanship: Republicans term-limit most of their committee chairs, and Granger ate up two of those terms in the minority. Now she’ll likely have to give up her gavel in a little over a year, because when the rebels took down McCarthy over a spending bill—her committee’s jurisdiction—they effectively destroyed what might have been her only term as a chairwoman. In retrospect, her defiance against the hardliners should have been obvious. But this is merely one example of a setback like this, and burgeoning grievances between members are only exacerbating this self-made mess.

McCarthy’s mirth, of course, hails from the fact that he is indeed an active participant in his own succession. Unlike John Boehner (who quit in a huff and quickly landed a board seat at Reynolds Tobacco and a cushy job as a weed lobbyist for Squire Patton & Boggs) or Paul Ryan (who rejected the Trump clown show for the higher calling of the Fox boardroom) or even former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (who scampered off to Moelis), McCarthy is sticking around, for now. And he has leverage, particularly in the form of his fundraising juggernaut, through which he raised $80 million last cycle.

And yet McCarthy seems invested in finding a speaker who would need him the most. He helped tank the nomination of Steve Scalise, his former deputy, and the guy who would have had the most seamless transition with his own political infrastructure and army of fundraisers downtown. After Scalise was nominated, McCarthy told reporters that he had a “big hill” to climb to get to 217, adding “[Scalise] told a lot of people he would be at 150 and he wasn’t there”—what some saw as a kiss of death.

Instead, McCarthy publicly whipped for Jim Jordan, a firebrand outsider who raised $14 million last cycle and detests the grip-and-grin part of donor maintenance. Jordan’s patrons on K-Street (which includes Big Tech) have described his fundraisers as “Star Wars bar parties,” referring to their lack of polish and deep pocketed mega donors—an insinuation that Jordan would need help from McCarthy and his people like Dan Conston at the leadership PAC or his top fundraiser Lauren Bryan. “Jim Jordan would be very deferential to Kevin on the fundraising apparatus; Jordan hates that shit, why wouldn’t he deputize Kevin to be in charge of that?” said another former leadership aide. This person continued: “There are a lot of strengths that Kevin has that Jordan doesn’t have. If he thinks that Kevin could do something that he couldn’t, he would let Kevin do it. Kevin is better at whipping moderates,” the source said.

McHenry, the speaker pro tempore selected by McCarthy, would also need his help for fundraising if he led a transitional House, which seems increasingly unlikely after another conference outburst today by hardliners who are refusing to entertain the possibility of a temporary speaker to pass spending bills. But if McHenry gets his turn again, however unlikely, they do have a strong bond, as evidenced when McHenry physically threw the gavel after McCarthy was ousted. But no matter who becomes speaker, it’s noticeable that McCarthy has been supporting members who would benefit from his largesse, perhaps setting up the sort of two-headed structure that many feared when Hakeem Jeffries ascended to minority leader and Nancy Pelosi stuck around as speaker emerita.“[Kevin’s] choosing weaker people who would need his support and depend on him,” said a former leadership aide.

Regardless, these guys are now toast, which leads way to another theory working its way around town—the notion that McCarthy is saying and doing the right things in case his old allies fall flat, everyone gets pissed at Matt Gaetz and the motion-to-vacate crowd, and asks for a mulligan, thereby welcoming him back as the only master zookeeper capable of the job. And, indeed, I’m hearing from all corners of the conference—except, of course, from the rebellious eight—that Republicans all want McCarthy back. Rep. Michael McCaul sort of put it out there on CNN on Tuesday, too: “maybe we ought to look at Kevin McCarthy again,” he said.

And McCarthy isn’t exactly rejecting it out of hand. Officially, he has said that he plans to run again for reelection in 2024. “If [McCarthy] is going to run again then a position helping the team is going to help him, but I don’t know why he would want to be Nancy Pelosi,” said former congressman Rodney Davis, a McCarthy supporter who is now on K Street. “McCarthy wants it back,” said another source close to the McCarthy apparatus. “The smile on his face. He’s keeping the dream alive, meeting with billionaire fundraisers or potential clients this week.” As this source put it, “McCarthy is orchestrating his revival.”

If there’s one thing that is clear about McCarthy, it’s that he’s shameless—or, perhaps, shame-proof. And now he appears to be sitting back and watching as his successors struggle to even reach the votes that he managed to secure to become speaker. After surviving through much of the year without any wiggle room, he’s never had so much juice. No wonder the guy seems so happy.