Rep. Tim Burchett says he feels sorry for Kevin McCarthy after Tuesday’s events on the Hill, when he claims the former House speaker elbowed him in the back.

“I prayed for him this morning because I know he’s hurting,” the Tennessee Republican said Wednesday on CNN, adding, “It’s just a sad commentary on his life. I’m sorry for him. I really am. I feel sorry for him.”

Burchett told reporters on Tuesday that McCarthy elbowed him in “a clean shot to the kidneys” while Burchett was speaking to a reporter, and that he chased after the former speaker to ask why he elbowed him. McCarthy denied that he elbowed Burchett to CNN later on Tuesday: “I didn’t shove or elbow him, it’s a tight hallway.”

Burchett called the incident “bizarre.”

“I’m sure right after he did it, he regretted it,” Burchett said. “And I have moved on. I have no vengeance towards him.”

A spokesperson for McCarthy did not immediately respond to POLITICO’s request for comment.

The hallway scuffle unveils the tensions simmering in the party since Burchett and seven other House Republicans voted to oust McCarthy as speaker last month.

Burchett declined to file an ethics complaint against McCarthy on Tuesday, though Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) filed one later on that evening.

When asked if McCarthy should resign, Burchett told CNN that he doesn’t “care what he does.”

“It doesn’t matter. The sooner he leaves, the sooner he will be making seven figures being a lobbyist,” Burchett told CNN. “Let’s be honest, he’s not going back to Bakersfield … if he feels like he doesn’t have a shot back to the speakership. And I suspect after Mike Johnson’s deal last night, he won’t be back.”

New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy, who has taken an active role in helping govern the state, is running in the 2024 Democratic U.S. Senate primary to replace the indicted U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez.

The 58-year-old former Republican is the second major Democratic figure to declare her candidacy, following Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.). But she instantly becomes the frontrunner thanks not just to her husband’s position as governor but her long list of contacts with party leaders, for whom she’s spent the last six years as a prolific fundraiser.

Murphy did not name Menendez specifically, but she included his image in part of her video launch decrying Capitol politics.

“Right now Washington is filled with too many people more interested in getting rich or getting on camera than getting things done for you,” she said.

Menendez, who’s facing extensive federal charges of bribery and acting as an unregistered foreign agent for the Egyptian government, has not said whether he plans to seek reelection but hinted at it Friday, saying in a statement that he is “used to tough fights and next year won’t be any different.” Menendez, who has pleaded not guilty to all charges, also took a vague swipe at Tammy Murphy last month, saying that if she runs “she’ll have to deal with a lot of baggage.”

But while Menendez won reelection by 10 points in 2018 a year after beating previous corruption charges with a hung jury, his popularity has cratered in New Jersey, with an October poll showing his favorability at just 8 percent.

Tammy Murphy, who grew up in Virginia, has said she was a Republican until the mid-2000s, when she began considering herself a Democrat due to her views on abortion, guns and the environment — issues she highlighted in her campaign announcement. The New York Times reported earlier this month that she voted in a Republican primary as recently as 2014, which was after her husband’s time as Democratic National Committee finance chair and U.S. ambassador to Germany in the Obama administration.

Signs appeared that Tammy Murphy would be more involved in her husband’s administration than most of her predecessors shortly after Phil Murphy was sworn into office in 2018, when the administration transformed a conference room down the hall from the governor’s office into a private office for her.

Tammy Murphy, who has four grown children, made maternal mortality her chief cause, highlighting New Jersey’s relatively high maternal death rate and how Black women were nearly seven times as likely as white women to die from childbirth-related complications. Her campaign noted that New Jersey has moved its national ranking for maternal deaths from 47th to 27th during her “Nurture NJ” initiative.

Murphy focused on that in her campaign video, acknowledging that she didn’t have to worry about surviving childbirth or the level of care for her newborns because of built-in advantages she had.

“The money in our family’s bank account, and frankly, the color of my skin meant I could get the best care available,” she said. “But that’s not the case for a lot of women.”

Murphy also highlighted her work on the environment, specifically making New Jersey the first in the nation to incorporate climate change into school curriculum.

Politically, Tammy Murphy has been one of the New Jersey Democratic Party’s top fundraisers, helping her develop relationships with party bosses who hold sway over county party endorsements. Those endorsements could award Murphy “the line” in most counties — a unique feature of ballot design in New Jersey that allows county party-endorsed candidates to run in primaries in the same column or row as every other country-endorsed candidate, from town council to president.

Murphy’s entry into the race wasn’t greeted with enthusiasm by some progressives, who saw it as nepotism and somewhat ironic, considering that Menendez had paved the way for his own son to be elected to the House of Representatives more than a year before his indictment.

Tammy Murphy has also faced controversy over her role in leading a political nonprofit called Stronger Fairer Forward that promotes her husband’s policies and has refused press requests to publicly release its donors. She and her husband also faced criticism early in the governor’s first term for poor living and playing conditions for the women’s soccer team they co-own, then called Sky Blue. Tammy Murphy pledged to improve conditions for the team, which changed its name to Gotham FC and last week won its league championship.

Kim has already won support from some of the groups on the party’s left flank. But Murphy’s campaign is expected to take advantage of the party infrastructure as well as her policy achievements that appeal to Black voters, who make up a big portion of the Democratic Party’s base.

In addition to Kim, left-wing activist Lawrence Hamm, who unsuccessfully challenged Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) in 2020, is also seeking the Democratic nomination. Kyle Jasey, a real estate lender from Jersey City and son of Assemblymember Mila Jasey (D-Essex), had filed to run for Senate but on Monday night announced he would drop out of the race to instead challenge Menendez’s son, U.S. Rep. Rob Menendez (D-N.J.).

On Saturday evening, the White House trashed a proposed House Republican government funding bill as “unserious” and a “recipe” for “chaos and more shutdowns.”

Within 72 hours, Biden officials quietly informed Democratic allies on the Hill that the president would support the measure and it sailed through the House.

The administration’s dramatic about face all but assured that the plan — which funds the government in two tranches into January and February — would make it into law. And, sure enough, on Tuesday night, the bill passed the House with the support of 209 Democrats. The Senate is expected to take up the measure this week and clear it comfortably before Saturday’s shutdown deadline.

“If it passes the Senate, the president will sign this continuing resolution that maintains current funding levels and has no harmful policy riders,” a White House official said shortly after the bill passed the House, 336-95.

The change of tune was driven by an acknowledgement that the House plan was likely to provide the closest thing to a victory for Democrats: averting not only a government shutdown but also steep cuts in funding.

Having entered into their first high-stakes negotiations with a new and untested House speaker, Democrats quietly feared that Republicans would demand a dramatic standoff. Instead, the process seemed likely to end in a relative whimper — and the lights would stay on.

“The initial reaction was: It keeps chaos going. Which it does,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), the No. 3 Democratic leader. “Then we started thinking about it. And what would happen if this didn’t pass.”

That doesn’t mean there weren’t hard compromises for Biden and allied Democrats to swallow. The deal again leaves out the White House’s chief legislative priority: a nearly $106 billion defense supplemental that would fund aid to Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific.

The White House’s chief concern — matching that of congressional Democrats — was a potentially complex system of multiple funding deadlines, which Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) last week called “the craziest, stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of.”

But Speaker Mike Johnson’s proposal, once the text came out Saturday, only had two deadlines. While White House officials and Democrats grumbled that the “goofy” two-tiered system increased the chance of shutdowns in the future because it kicks the can again — with two deadlines, to boot. Yet it wasn’t enough of a reason to oppose the bill now. Stabenow speculated the two deadlines were included “so the speaker could tell his most extreme members that they would have other opportunities to cause problems.”

Biden administration officials acknowledged the bill is not what they would have proposed, but it keeps the government open and averts spending cuts, according to an administration official granted anonymity to discuss strategy. Yet, the White House was also not eager to come out strongly for a bill that didn’t contain its defense supplemental priorities, the official added, saying that a strong show of support from Biden also could have risked passage in the House by galvanizing Republicans against it.

In the end, only two House Democrats opposed the bill, a point of unity that pleased the White House, particularly as the vote sharply divided House Republicans. While 127 Republicans supported, 93 opposed.

After issuing the statement of opposition to the House bill on Saturday evening, the most substantive public comment the White House would make afterward was that it was staying in touch with counterparts on the Hill and eager to avoid a shutdown. The White House did not even issue a Statement of Administration Policy on the bill declaring what action the president would be advised to take on the measure — an unusual move for major legislation.

“To the White House’s credit, they took a look at it, thought about it, and said ‘Okay, yeah, this is what we want to support,’” said Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

Once it became clear that the defense supplemental would not be included on the funding bill, “it was very smart of the White House to recognize the futility of that approach and to pivot to something that is at least possible,” Smith said.

Privately, administration officials, including OMB Director Shalanda Young and those from the Office of Legislative Affairs, were in touch with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer through the weekend.

The first inkling of the White House’s about face came Tuesday morning, when Schumer indicated he’d spoken to top White House officials about their concerns. Schumer said he and the White House agreed “that if this can avoid a shutdown, it’ll be a good thing.”

The fast-moving legislation and lack of clear direction from the White House led to some uncertainty about the bill’s fate.

“My guess is that the White House doesn’t like this. I don’t think that’s changed. But if it ends up getting a bunch of Democratic votes in the House and the Senate, I would imagine the White House is not going to veto it,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Tuesday morning.

Some Senate Democrats were still trying to figure out how they would vote on the measure. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) said he was “inclined” to support the bill when it came to the Senate.

“Obviously I would be concerned given where it’s coming from [in the House]. But if it is a clean CR that allows us to get more time to address all these things and we’re not spending the week before Thanksgiving arguing?” Fetterman said. “We should never be in a place where we’re arguing that it’s on the table that you could shut things down.”

The question now facing Democrats and the White House is what they can do to move the president’s foreign aid request forward. The next time partial government funding will run out is on Jan. 19, and there are no legislative deadlines that could prompt action before then.

Republican Ukraine supporters expressed little concern about kicking the can. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate now has “January and into February to get the job done, and that’s what we hope to be able to accomplish.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) expressed even more optimism: “We hope to get it all done by the end of the year.”

A White House official said the administration and Democratic leaders made clear to Republicans how much they prioritize the defense supplemental.

Schumer, for his part, indicated the Senate would address the defense supplemental shortly after the chamber returns from Thanksgiving.

But the bill still faces the same tough politics. Conservative opposition to funding Ukraine has grown deeper and Republicans have inextricably linked border policy with Ukraine — a move that’s setting up tough negotiations.

On Tuesday, Democrats, however, said they felt they were playing the hand they were dealt as best as they could.

“We’re living in a world of crazy,” Murphy said. “At some point, you have to cut weird deals with arsonists. And that’s where we are.”