Good evening,

Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. It’s been quite an inaugural week, you know, with Capitol Hill having been transformed into a high school cafeteria. On behalf of Julia Ioffe and Tina Nguyen, thanks for your support and feedback.

I’m ending the week with a look at one of the more underappreciated elements of this speakership crisis: the complex, teetering relationship between Kevin McCarthy and his deputy, Steve Scalise. After all, one of them desperately wants to become Speaker of the House so badly that he capitulated on nearly every demand imaginable. And the other has ostensibly remained loyal in every conceivable way, presumably so as not to flash any signs of his own ambition. How long can the detente last? We’ll see…

Steve Scalise, McCarthy’s outwardly loyal deputy, has taken on a more complex role in this negotiation since one of the saboteurs signaled late last year that they’d happily support him as speaker. Ever since, the dynamic has acquired an aura of gamesmanship: On the surface, Scalise must remain ever loyal or risk his own fate...