Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tara Palmeri.

Tonight, a temperature check on the Hill, where displeasure with Mike Johnson is building and there’s already chatter about who might lead the conference in the next Congress if Republicans are in the minority. Plus, more on Kevin McCarthy’s higher calling after Congress.

Plus: Check out this week’s episodes of Somebody’s Gotta Win: a conversation with Never Trumper Steve Schmidt about why he was working for Dean Phillips, and a crosstalk with CNN’s Audie Cornish about how we do our jobs in the era of welp politics.

But first, Abby Livingston’s Capitol Hill report…

The race will likely draw operatives, donors, and elected officials from well beyond Long Island. And while it will likely enter a dormant phase over the holidays, Election Day is February 13. Here’s what else you need to know:

• New York Democrats have a lot to prove: This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for the state’s Democrats, who are still smarting from their underperformance in 2022. That was apparent last week when Governor Kathy Hochul threw her support behind Suozzi, a former rival. But the real stakes are for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who represents the nearby 8th District. It’s a matter of basic credibility for a politician of his stature to influence politics in his own backyard. This will be the first major general election race during his tenure as leader (as will it be for D.C.C.C. chairwoman Suzan DelBene).

  Moreover, the greater New York metropolitan region is the central front in the Democratic offensive to take back the House next fall. For several cycles, Long Island has appeared to be slipping out of the Democrats’ grasp, and many, many party members say this is an opportunity to turn the tide. It is wise to anticipate heavy delegation support—keep an eye on Grace Meng, Nydia Velázquez and Gregory Meeks to campaign here alongside Jeffries.

• What Republicans have to prove: On the flip side, this will be the first special in a post-Kevin McCarthy world, and a test of how the House political apparatus operates without him. One early point of interest: Pilip is an Ethiopian Jewish veteran of the I.D.F.—exactly the kind of candidate McCarthy would have recruited.

  But it’s unclear if Speaker Mike Johnson or another member of current House G.O.P. leadership is as interested in politicking as the former speaker. Watch Elise Stefanik, who last cycle fashioned herself as a mentor and campaigner for New York congressional candidates and promptly endorsed Pilip on Thursday afternoon.

  Now that Republicans have their nominee in place, the biggest variable is how much the House Republican campaign apparatus is prepared to spend here. (Democrats are bouncing off the walls to compete.) The N.R.C.C., led by chairman Richard Hudson, appears poised to engage. But it’s also my sense that some powerful Republican decision-makers are taking a wait-and-see approach—even as the shrinking margin looms over the caucus.

• Not again: While Santos is having the time of his life on the celebrity app Cameo, it’s apparent that his time in Congress is a source of enormous local shame. As such, Republicans implemented an intensive vetting process before settling on Pilip. “They’re done being embarrassed,” a New York Republican operative told me. So far, the worst rap on her is that she’s a registered Democrat. The G.O.P. likely would have continued to dig, but Democrats picked Suozzi a week ago, meaning delaying the selection further would cost them precious time in a very compressed campaign schedule.

  Suozzi, meanwhile, appears to have made good use of his head start: He’s already banked enough money to reserve cable ad buys beginning this week, according to media-buy trackers. Suozzi has also held public office off and on since 1994, and ran statewide twice. This translates to lots of name identification around the district, but it also means that everyone involved generally thinks that if he had skeletons, they’d have already been found.

That’s all well and lovely, but I’m increasingly hearing that Johnson’s brief honeymoon phase is already over and done with. On Wednesday, hardliners accused him of going behind their backs and using a “page ripped from the Boehner playbook” to pass the National Defense Authorization Act without their support. And he still faces an even more treacherous challenge in January and February, when House Republicans will need to coalesce around two sets of budgets to prevent the government from shutting down.

Predictably, there’s already some chatter on K Street and around the Hill about whether Steve Scalise, McCarthy’s longtime No. 2, could make another play for the top spot. If Republicans lose the majority in November, the thinking goes, Scalise would seek to become minority leader rather than accept a demotion back to his old role of whip, which he may be loath to do.

Furthermore, the Scalise supporters I talk to are adamant that Johnson wouldn’t run for minority leader, arguing that it wouldn’t make sense for the conference to essentially knock off the most senior person on the leadership team in favor of a recent backbencher like Johnson, who just happened to have the lucky parachute during a once-in-a-century leadership clusterfuck. “Mike Johnson is going to disappear,” predicted one former senior leadership source. “Even if he’s the leader, they’re not going to make him minority leader and bump Scalise down.”

Adding to the drama, of course, is the possibility that Republicans have a devastating election night in November, leading to calls for an entirely new leadership team. If that comes to pass, the conference will likely be smaller and more conservative—given the expected losses in New York, California, and Illinois—and the hardliners may demand someone even more conservative.

At the moment, however, with the government on the brink of another shutdown, with aid needed in Israel and Ukraine, and a fractious caucus of uppity hardliners making everything gratuitously difficult, Scalise appears to be in the catbird seat. “Scalise is sitting pretty, letting Mike Johnson deal with these problems,” said a former leadership chief of staff turned lobbyist, who suggested Johnson wouldn’t challenge Scalise. (A source close to Johnson countered that he has not ruled out running for minority leader.)

Everyone I’ve spoken with says there’s not a drop of bad blood between them. “Leader Scalise and Speaker Johnson have been friends for years and are working closely together to advance our agenda through the House,” said Scalise spokesperson Lauren Fine. “Speaker Johnson is united with our entire leadership team in securing conservative victories, raising record funds, and winning up and down the ballot in 2024,” said Johnson’s deputy chief of staff Raj Shah.

Nevertheless, it hasn’t gone unnoticed in Washington that Scalise, not Johnson, currently has the largest fundraising operation on the Hill and a massive network on K Street, where Johnson remains an unknown quantity. As a senior Republican aide observed, Johnson might not want to go head-to-head with someone who has hauled in $170 million over his entire career. And Scalise is freer to operate now that he’s no longer being siloed by his old boss McCarthy, who kept him out of the loop on legislation and backroom deals—and never seemed to really trust him (note his decision to back Jim Jordan during the recent speakership melee). With McCarthy gone and Patrick McHenry on the way out, there are opportunities for Scalise to capture members looking for a new big buddy. Scalise is also focusing on candidate recruitment, ensuring a new crop of loyal acolytes will populate each cycle.

A Scalise revival wouldn’t be unprecedented. Many recall John Boehner’s setback, in 1999, when he lost his conference seat and then staged his comeback by beating Roy Blunt. Even McCarthy bounced back after 2015, when he tried for speaker but was beaten by dark horse Paul Ryan. He stayed on as majority leader, offering Ryan institutional knowledge he picked up while serving as majority whip and chief deputy whip. It’s a role that Scalise seems to have stepped into, and it’s one that his allies see as a strong platform to continue to build out his relationships.

Johnson, for his part, is taking a different tack. He was quick to endorse Donald Trump, something that Scalise has still yet to do. “The best thing that Mike Johnson has going for him, is that he endorsed him pretty quickly, which means a lot to the Trump people,” said a former Trump official. “They appreciate it.” One conservative activist put it slightly differently: “Mike Johnson has the X-factor because he’s one of us, he’s a foot soldier in the conservative movement; that’s where Johnson stands out from the current leadership.”

Indeed, as McCarthy packed up his office this week, he told Mike Allen that he’s eager to get into the artificial intelligence business and that he hopes to leverage his relationship with Elon Musk. Apparently there’s a memoir to look forward to, as well.

The key for McCarthy will be to prove that he’s still plugged in and relevant, even as he steps away from the levers of power. Speakers often wash out of this circuit unless they can continue to augment their presentation with new inside knowledge and juicy anecdotes. For McCarthy, a direct line to Trump would most certainly keep him in the game, especially if Trump wins in 2024.

The two men have long had an on-again, off-again relationship: Jacqueline Alemany at The Washington Post reported that they recently got in a screaming match after McCarthy blamed Trump for not standing up for him. (McCarthy’s team disputes that he said “Fuck you” to the former president.) But that’s all in the past, anyway. After finally accepting his new life outside the dome, McCarthy quickly endorsed Trump, adding that he would happily serve in his cabinet.

Notably, McCarthy has made it clear that he doesn’t want to be a lobbyist. Rather, he wants to consult and advise C-suite types, as Paul Ryan does at Teneo. So don’t expect him to link up with Jeff Miller, his best friend and one of the city’s most prolific lobbyists and fundraisers, to join his firm. I expect he’ll sit on some boards and play the influence game.

But McCarthy has also indicated that he isn’t entirely over his defenestration. In the Journal op-ed, he noted he would be involved in candidate recruitment, which appears to include finding primary challengers to sully the hopes of the eight incumbents who voted him down. I’m told that McCarthy has become fixated specifically on helping to select and back a primary challenger against Nancy Mace, who was one of the most brazen of the eight no votes. Her rejection was a particularly bitter betrayal for McCarthy, who invested heavily in her race after her district was redrawn as a deep shade of red and she picked up a Trump-backed primary challenger.

Mace has said she’s not worried, but others note that it could be hard to get voters to the polls for a primary in the second week of June, especially during an election year, when voters are distracted and fatigued. “Nancy is a hard one to beat,” one South Carolina operative said, but added that she may be feeling the heat. “She couldn’t edge her way closer to the microphone during impeachment.”