Hello, welcome to 2023 and the inaugural week of The Best & The Brightest! It’s finally here and you are receiving it because you were either a subscriber to Tomorrow Will Be Worse or to Tara Palmeri’s must-read Washington Mall. Now we’ve combined the two products into one can’t-miss daily email on what’s really going on in Washington.

Yesterday, you received our very first dispatch from the fabulous Tara about the utter shitshow-slash-high school popularity contest that is the race for the Speaker’s gavel. Tomorrow, you will get a letter from the incomparable Tina Nguyen about what Kevin McCarthy’s saboteurs really want, followed by another one from Tara on Friday. We’ll also get the occasional cameo from our very own Peter Hamby, who also hosts our not-to-be-missed daily podcast, The Powers That Be. (If you missed the most recent episode, Peter and I discuss Volodymyr Zelensky’s transformation into a wartime president here.)

We do hope you like it here, and if you haven’t done so already, subscribe here or email fritz@puck.news to gift a membership to a friend.

But first, a quick dispatch from Tara on the latest inside the McCarthy thunderdome…

Former member Rodney Davis, who has been dispatched by the not-yet-Speaker’s office to help whip votes, told me the meeting itself was “telltale” for McCarthy. “There’s a huge sense of optimism right now because they’re talking and they’re offering up solutions,” said Davis.

Will that entail once unthinkable trades, like Gaetz becoming chairman of the armed services subcommittee, as has been reported? It’s possible, Davis suggested. (This would also have major repercussions for Ukraine aid, as Julia reports below.) But I still don’t think it would move Gaetz. This comes as Ken Buck intimated after the fifth vote that he’s done with voting for McCarthy (though he still did for a sixth vote) and announced on CNN that perhaps they should be talking a bit more openly about Steve Scalise.

Indeed, everyone is now looking for smoke signals from Scalise’s office. My sources on the Hill were stirring after hearing that Scalise called McCarthy ally Jason Smith into his office this afternoon. Smith is a vocal proponent of McCarthy and the kind of “Only Kevin” that Scalise would have to win over to make this work. Also, Smith has his eye on leading the powerful Ways and Means Committee. One source heard Scalise was calling Smith in to tell him to deliver the message to McCarthy that time is up, and he needs a chance to run. Scalise’s spokesperson acknowledged they met but said the conversation was about committees and unrelated to the speaker vote. “This is completely false… at no point did either of them discuss Kevin McCarthy stepping aside,” she told me, adding that Scalise still supports McCarthy for speaker. Smith too denied that they talked about McCarthy’s speakership. “Absolutely not, that’s a complete lie,” Smith told me. “Someone is lying. That was never discussed.”

There is one thing we know for sure: D.C.’s High Holy Day, or 2 p.m. on Thursday, is approaching. It’s the hour when jet fumes call members back to their districts and when real conversations happen. I suspect that’s when they start talking about who can win over the “No” votes, not the other way around. If there’s one thing lawmakers can agree on, it’s that they don’t want to stay in D.C. on Friday. Do the “Only Kevins” love him enough to give up their weekend, or even just their Friday? Sadly, I doubt it. So if McCarthy wasn’t able to peel off some “No” votes after this meeting, he might really be cooked.

And now back to Julia…

The war has settled into a grinding slog, what military analyst Michael Kofman, who has become a kind of prophet of this conflict, has called its “transitional phase.” There are no more spectacular breakthroughs of the kind we saw in Kharkiv, no more surrenders like the one we witnessed at Kherson in November. The war is now concentrated where it had been since 2014: the Donbas. The Ukrainian army seems to be on the verge of taking Kreminna, a small eastern city in Ukraine that’s been occupied by the Russians. Fifty miles to the south, Russian forces, led mainly by Evgeny Prigozhin’s mercenary Wagner Group, have been trying for months to take Bakhmut—though, according to the well-regarded Institute for the Study of War, they are on the verge of “culminating,” that is, exhausting themselves. (Prigozhin seemed to acknowledge as much in a recent on-camera visit to his troops in Bakhmut, where they complained of a lack of equipment and he exaggerated the fortifications of the city.)

As readers of Tomorrow Will Be Worse will recall, this has been an artillery war for months now, and the burn rate—i.e., the rate at which the Ukrainian military is using up munitions to keep up with incoming fire from the Russian side—is putting a strain on what Ukraine’s Western partners can supply. Of course, it’s putting a strain on the Russian side, too. As several military analysts have noted, if Russia had enough weapons but not enough men to shoot them before Vladimir Putin’s partial military call-up in September, now Russia is running short of munitions, despite bragging that its Kalibr cruise missiles “will never run out.” Indeed, Russia now has plenty of men but not enough things for them to shoot. It’s all coalescing around a classic Russian strategy to stall a war it can’t win outright: throw bodies at the meat grinder until the meat grinder simply breaks.

To wit, Matt Gaetz, one of the leaders of the anti-McCarthy resistance, has been tweeting that Ukraine seems to be one of the reasons for his opposition to “my Kevin.” (Gaetz, you’ll recall, was one of the House members who, along with Lauren Boebert, refused to applaud Volodymyr Zelensky when he delivered a stirring address to a joint session of Congress last month.) And, as our own Tara Palmeri has been telling me, anti-McCarthy MAGA folks are passing around a photo of the party leader wearing a Ukraine flag pin with a matching pocket square. The message seems to be that this man who believes in nothing supported a “blank check to Ukraine” before he was against it, back when it was fashionable. Whoever replaces him will be a firmer believer in not funding another “forever war,” especially not one supported by the Democrat in the White House.

So is Ukraine aid in danger? Nah.

Pretty much no one I spoke to in Washington is worried. Despite the very loud opposition from the MAGA wing of the Republican Party in Congress, support for Ukraine is still very much the mainstream position for both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. The number might fluctuate, the way the aid is structured might change, but it won’t go away. “Because I think there’s a bipartisan consensus in favor of it and that the handful of crazies will make a lot of noise but won’t set policy in the end,” one Republican foreign policy insider told me. “As long as Ukrainians seem to be winning, and it doesn’t cost us anything real, I think it should be fine.” (When I asked what they meant by “anything real,” the insider explained: “Americans aren’t getting killed.”)

Democrats I spoke to were a little spooked by the level of dysfunction this foretold. (“I don’t know how the House even funds the U.S. government right now, never mind the Ukrainians,” one Democratic Senate staffer said, and a Democratic senator texted that all kinds of aid would now be in danger because “it is the leverage of the few that will make everything much more difficult over in the House.”) But it was the Republicans who were the most confident that aid to Ukraine would be safe from the Never Kevins. “I actually don’t think there will be problems with Ukraine aid regardless of what happens in the House,” a Senate leadership aide told me. “Ukraine aid has never gone on its own, it always rides along with something else, like the omnibus. Democrats can always insist on adding it and, as long as there’s a strong bipartisan consensus and the White House is strongly in favor of it, I really don’t think there will be a problem, despite what the House Freedom Caucus is saying.” Moreover, the aide added, the Senate, where support for Ukraine is rock solid, can always originate bills that are then voted on in the House.

Lockheed also makes Javelins, the mascot of the early Ukrainian resistance. The anti-tank rockets are manufactured in Troy, Alabama, which Trump carried by 18 points in 2020. Raytheon, which makes the surface-to-air missiles (NASAMS) that have been ordered for Ukraine, manufactures them in Tucson, Arizona, a crucial swing state. Raytheon also makes Patriot missiles, which the Biden administration has just approved for Ukrainian use, in Huntsville, Alabama, one of the reddest states in the nation. Moreover, these are high-skilled, high-paying manufacturing jobs—the exact kind of jobs that Republicans have talked about returning to the U.S.

“It’s insane that people don’t understand that,” said the Republican Senate leadership aide. “This is money for jobs in America to produce weapons that are made in America. We’re not sending money to Ukrainians to just go shopping wherever they want. We’re sending them money that’s spent in America on American-made weapons.” And much of the money being allotted for Ukraine is actually going to replenish the Pentagon’s own stocks, to replace what the United States has already sent to Ukraine. Then again, the aide added, “I think people that talk about a blank check to Ukraine are not honest actors. They understand what they’re doing.”

Julia