| | | | |  | | By Elana Schor | | 
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is facing roadblocks in his attempt to become Speaker. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images | SPEAKER STANDOFF — The stereotype of a Washington operator is all about backroom deals and face-saving maneuvers. But sometimes the way to navigate a challenging situation may be to embrace the risk you'd otherwise try spinning your way out of — to go more Evel Knievel than Tom DeLay or Nancy Pelosi. That may be Kevin McCarthy's white-knuckle future. Right now McCarthy has five prospective opponents threatening to stand between him and the House speakership on Jan. 3, with one of them promising that more than a dozen others wait in the wings to take him down. The California Republican counts plenty of allies in his GOP conference, but he's likely to have a margin as small as five votes to work with on the floor next year, which makes every potential defector a hurdle to jump. To top it off, McCarthy has only a month left to lock down the votes. It's "a long way to go and a short time to get there," as the "Smokey and the Bandit" theme famously sang. And McCarthy is sending a strong signal that he's not backing down from possible defeat televised live on C-SPAN. He's making the leap, whether it ends in a crash or safe landing. "We're going to do vote after vote after vote for Kevin" on Jan. 3, forcing his conservative critics to relent or accept a possible speaker they might like less, McCarthy ally Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) told our Olivia Beavers and Jordain Carney this week . Now, it's highly unlikely that Jan. 3 will play out the way the speakership roller-coaster of 1855 did, lasting two months and 133 ballots before a winner emerged. But sending the election to multiple ballots could benefit McCarthy in one big way: The House can't organize itself for a new Congress until the speaker is selected. So the longer any floor free-for-all goes on, the clearer the image will be of Republicans in … well, disarray. And McCarthy's best chance at a comeback win, should he fall short on the first ballot, relies on conservatives looking like they're the ones pulling a stunt and distracting the new majority from the task of governing. That may mean exhausting his opposition by letting multiple alternative candidates emerge. It's easy to miss how historically rare that scenario would be: According to the Congressional Research Service , 2015 was the first year since 1937 that any lawmaker not internally chosen by a party caucus was formally nominated as a speaker candidate. A potential speaker needs to win a majority of members present and voting, so balloting that pushes some members into absentee status could do the trick. But McCarthy could also buckle in for a bumpy ride, only to find that he can survive thanks to a lack of procedural savvy among his critics — who met with the House parliamentarian this week to learn more about the Wild West fight they're promising to pick. Then again, McCarthy could find his own wingmen building more roadblocks for him. Centrists are floating the extreme long shot of a more moderate alternative ( even one who's not a sitting member ) to demonstrate to the right flank that as much as it disfavors McCarthy, there are even worse options. It's enough to make a House minority leader issue a distress call. At the very least, he should fasten his seat belt. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight's author at eschor@politico.com or on Twitter at @eschor .
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Rep-elect Max Miller (R-Ohio) got first dibs on picking an office among freshman representatives. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images | ROLL OF THE DICE — Members-elect gathered this morning for a long-practiced tradition for new lawmakers: picking new offices for the 118th Congress, write Nancy Vu and Jackie Padilla . Seventy-three soon-to-be members gathered in the Cannon Caucus room to pick from a box that held slips of paper numbered 1-73, representing the order in which they get to pick their office. (Originally there were 74, but Rep.-elect Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.) was a no-show, defaulting to the last pick.) Freshman are often stuck with the least desirable offices in the Capitol, as returning members are given priority when new offices open up due to lost elections or retirements. Rayburn House Office Building is the most sought after, being the only building connected to the Capitol by the subway, and it is the newest building, constructed in 1965. However, none of the building's offices were available to freshmen. Longworth and Cannon are much older, built in 1933 and 1908. Longworth is newer and closer to the House floor, and Cannon's ongoing rehabilitation could be quite a noisy distraction for incoming members. Rep.-elect Max Miller (R-Ohio) got first dibs on picking an office, followed by Reps.-elect Mike Ezell (R-Miss.) and Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.). Rep.-elect Mark Alford (R-Mo.) got unlucky number 73, meaning he will select second-to-last, before Jackson.
| | | — HHS to end public health emergency for monkeypox in January: The Biden administration announced today it will lift its public health emergency declaration for mpox , following a steady decline in cases that has convinced officials the outbreak is under control. The Health and Human Services Department issued a formal notice saying it will wind down the emergency in 60 days, putting it on track to expire by Jan. 31. — 'Silence is complicity': Biden calls out antisemitism amid Kanye West's Hitler comments: President Joe Biden today called on political leaders to reject antisemitism "wherever it hides," just a day after the rapper Ye, better known as Kanye West, went on a tirade praising Adolf Hitler and Nazis. "I just want to make a few things clear: The Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure," Biden said in a tweet. "And instead of giving it a platform, our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting antisemitism wherever it hides. Silence is complicity." — Infowars host Alex Jones files for personal bankruptcy: Infowars host Alex Jones filed for personal bankruptcy protection in Texas today as he faces nearly $1.5 billion in court judgments over conspiracy theories he spread about the Sandy Hook school massacre. Jones filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in bankruptcy court in Houston. His filing lists $1 billion to $10 billion in liabilities owed to 50 to 99 creditors and $1 million to $10 million in assets. — 'We want him here': Maxine Waters urges Bankman-Fried to testify: House Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) today said she has invited FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to testify at the panel's Dec. 13 hearing on the cryptocurrency exchange's collapse. The former FTX CEO has signaled that he would be open to testifying before Congress. Bankman-Fried on Wednesday said at the New York Times DealBook Summit that he "would not be surprised if I'm up there talking about what happened to our representatives."
| | | IRAN'S ASSASSINS — On a balmy September evening last year, an Azeri man carrying a Russian passport crossed the border from northern Cyprus into southern Cyprus. He traveled light: a pistol, a handful of bullets and a silencer. It was going to be the perfect hit job. Then, just as the man was about to step into a rental car and carry out his mission — which prosecutors say was to gun down five Jewish businessmen, including an Israeli billionaire — the police surrounded him. The failed attack was just one of at least a dozen in Europe in recent years, some successful, others not, that have involved what security officials call "soft" targets, involving murder, abduction, or both. The operations were broadly similar in conception, typically relying on local hired guns. The most significant connection, intelligence officials say, is that the attacks were commissioned by the same contractor: the Islamic Republic of Iran, writes Matthew Karnitschnig . In Cyprus, authorities believe Iran, which blames Israel for a series of assassinations of nuclear specialists working on the Iranian nuclear program, was trying to signal that it could strike back where Israel least expects it. And it's working. That success has come in large part because Europe — the staging ground for most Iranian operations in recent years — has been afraid to make Tehran pay. Since 2015, Iran has carried out about a dozen operations in Europe, killing at least three people and abducting several others, security officials say. Read the entire story here .
| | | | | 263,000 The number of jobs employers added in November , beating estimates. Unemployment stayed at 3.7 percent. All year, as inflation has surged and the Fed has imposed ever-higher borrowing rates, America's labor market has defied skeptics, adding hundreds of thousands of jobs each month. While a strong sign for the strength of the labor market, the number does suggest that inflation shows few signs of dramatically slowing. | | | | | ELON'S ARMY — Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter has been something of a Rorschach test for the platform's users; some quickly paint him as an authoritarian overlord while others argue that he's ridding the platform of the sort of "woke" language and actions that — according to them — drag companies down. You can count multiple other tech CEOs in the latter camp. Suspicious of their own workers, wondering if they could use a reduction in force and a recommitment to harsh business principles, they're looking to Musk and hoping that he succeeds. Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer report for The Verge.
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Esgar Guarín setting up electronic equipment inside his mobile vasectomy clinic. | Chase Castor/POLITICO | THE MOBILE SNIP — Inside a black trailer vinyl-wrapped with illustrations of cartoon sperm, the faint smell of burning flesh fills the enclosure. Here, in this unconventional operating room — situated in a Planned Parenthood parking lot — the doctor is trying, with mixed success, to get his patient to relax, writes Jesús A. Rodríguez . "You have to breathe," Esgar Guarín, small-framed and slender, tells Denny Dalliance gently. "Take a deep breath." Dalliance, who's 31, drives a truck for a living and arrived clad in black, is trying to keep his cool. Just minutes before, he peeled off his leather jacket and hopped on the operating table. Now he's forcefully exhaling, squeezing his eyes shut, folding an arm over his head, as his partner reassuringly caresses his arm. They're sitting inside the country's only mobile vasectomy clinic, owned and operated by Guarín, who is so committed to getting men to participate in contraception that he once performed the procedure on himself, on camera. He's been practicing medicine for 20 years and over the past few, he's clocked in more than 3,000 vasectomies. Whether or not they wanted a vasectomy before June 24, the majority of the 15 men Rodríguez spoke with said Dobbs accelerated their decision-making process. Some of them saw this as the only alternative, given the unavailability of abortion in some states and the specter of the Supreme Court targeting contraception next, taking a hint from Justice Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion. Others said their families wouldn't have chosen abortion anyway but credited the Dobbs decision with expanding the availability of these vasectomies — and prompting them to make the calls. Go inside the mobile clinic traversing the nation . Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here . | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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