Feinstein Succession Dish & Primary Foreplay

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Good evening,

Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, our new weekly composite of what’s really going on in this town—inside the White House, the Pentagon, on K Street, the Hill, and more. I’m Tara Palmeri. On behalf of my partners Julia Ioffe and Tina Nguyen, thanks for your ongoing support and feedback.

Tonight, I’m sharing my conversation with the peerless Peter Hamby, the host of Snap’s Good Luck America and Puck’s very own daily podcast, The Powers That Be. Peter, a former campaign reporter and longtime political media analyst, has a smart insider’s view into the rapidly evolving succession battle over Dianne Feinstein’s seat in California, Biden’s classified docs drama, the real reason Democrats moved their first primary to South Carolina, and why everyone in town is whispering about Ro Khanna.

But first…

Feeling the Vern

As I wrote last week, Republicans have been fixated on whether 71-year-old Rep. Vern Buchanan might retire from Congress after losing the House Ways & Means chairmanship to the 42-year-old Speaker’s pet Jason Smith, potentially reducing Kevin McCarthy’s margin of error from four votes to three to pass critical partisan legislation. (If McCarthy somehow loses fabulist George Santos, too, he could be held hostage by as few as two members of his already fractious House conference.) Vern’s people say he won’t retire (despite the rumblings on the Hill), but they didn’t deny that he was mighty pissed to be passed over as the most senior person on the Ways & Means committee by Smith, a member who was...

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Feinstein Succession Dish & Primary Foreplay

The real inside story that everyone is talking about in D.C.: Biden’s political mess, life after Feinstein, D.N.C. convention ‘Survivor,’ and much more.

TARA PALMERI AND PETER HAMBY

Senator Dianne Feinstein is still in the Senate and has made no indication that she plans to step down, despite widespread concerns about her age (she’s nine years older than Joe Biden) and her health. Of course, none of that has stopped would-be successors like Katie Porter and Barbara Lee from making it known they’re eyeing her seat. Adam Schiff hasn’t declared his aspirations publicly, but it’s widely understood inside Capitol Hill that his interest in Feinstein’s seat is what held him back from challenging Hakeem Jeffries for Minority Leader. There will be other contenders, too—these top Democratic seats don’t open up every day in California.

The looming question, among others, formed the basis of my intimate chat about the real inside conversations coursing through our politics right now...

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