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…

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