THE NEW CALENDAR — Moving South Carolina to the front of the Democratic party’s presidential primary calendar won’t matter much in 2024 if, as expected, Joe Biden runs for reelection, likely without serious opposition.

But whenever the next open presidential primary comes around — in two years if Biden doesn’t run, or four years later if he does — the Democrats’ proposed reordering of states could have a gigantic impact on the prospects of a whole crop of contenders.

The early consensus is that Kamala Harris, the first woman and first Black woman vice president, stands to benefit most from South Carolina going first. Despite her collapse in the 2020 primary, she has a favorable approval rating among Black voters, who make up a majority of the Democratic primary electorate in South Carolina. By virtue of her office, she is now inextricably tied to Biden, who is all but royalty there.

Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, may gain a step with her state moving up in the primary order — after South Carolina, New Hampshire and Nevada on the same day, then Georgia. The proposal to include Georgia in the early-state window may give a lift to Sen. Raphael Warnock, whose victory over Herschel Walker in the Senate runoff there Tuesday — his second successful turn in the national spotlight — has sparked party chatter about his future prospects. The decision not to include Minnesota may be a setback for the senator from that state who ran in 2020, Amy Klobuchar.

But if there is a real loser in South Carolina’s big win, it would seem to be Pete Buttigieg.

Since his loss in the 2020 presidential primary and installation as transportation secretary, Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., has been all over the country — and cable TV — selling the president’s infrastructure agenda while raising his already-considerable profile.

He moved from heavily conservative Indiana to Michigan, a friendlier state for an ambitious Democrat (He’s said the move was to be closer to his in-laws). And like Whitmer, his home there may help him in a future primary.

But the Democrats’ discarding of Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state that launched Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign, wipes away a favorable state for him. And its replacement, South Carolina, could hardly be worse. Buttigieg, who suffered in 2020 from his failure to make inroads with Black voters, finished fourth in South Carolina that year, not only behind Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, but also billionaire Tom Steyer.

The early state order is not yet set in stone, and its significance can be overestimated. First does not necessarily mean decisive, as Ryan Lizza pointed out the other day. And regardless of which state goes first, any candidate lacking Biden’s years-long relationship with Black voters — whether Buttigieg or anyone else — will have to find a way to appeal more to the party’s most reliable voting bloc to win a Democratic nomination.

Assuming Biden will seek reelection, lots can change for other Democrats before 2028. And Buttigieg isn’t running for president right now.

Asked about the early-state order, Hari Sevugan, who was Buttigieg’s deputy campaign manager in 2020, suggested Buttigieg was focused on his job.

“As far as I understand it,” he told Nightly, “there’s no DOT issues in the proposal.”

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at [email protected]. Or contact tonight’s author at [email protected] or on Twitter at @davidsiders.

HELP WANTED — Border funding will be one of House Republicans’ biggest causes next year. There’s just one hiccup: They’re struggling to find someone to lead the charge, writes Sarah Ferris.

The House GOP is still searching for a senior lawmaker willing to head the politically combustible panel that oversees funding for the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies for the next Congress, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions.

While the perch has major perks, including sway over high-profile border and immigration issues, Republican lawmakers say interested colleagues are hesitating given the history of gridlock in the job — particularly in a bitterly divided chamber with a slim GOP majority.

The current senior Republican on the homeland security spending panel, Tennessee Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, has served two terms and could still do one more but said in an interview today that he’s eyeing the top spot on other panels. The position of the House’s top spot for homeland security spending holds a reputation as the toughest job among the multiple powerful “cardinals” who shape agency budgets on the Appropriations Committee.

The job comes with a tremendous amount of pressure back home, especially for Republicans: “People expect you to be able to fix it. They forget that this is a body where you have to have 218 votes,” said Rep. John Carter (R-Texas), who led the panel during the Trump administration. “It becomes a very difficult place to be,” he added.

Still, clinching a top role on the House Appropriations Committee — which distributes over $1 trillion in federal spending each year — is typically one of the Capitol’s most sought-after positions. That’s particularly true under divided government, when little beyond funding bills have a strong chance to reach a president’s desk. Leading the committee’s defense or transportation efforts, for instance, could mean handing out millions of dollars to military bases or bridge projects back home, often with a subcommittee chair’s name branded on them for years to come.

— FDA greenlights bivalent vaccines for children as young as 6 months old: The move to authorize bivalent shots for young children made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna comes as Covid-19 infections in the United States tick up amid the most intense flu season in years. The FDA recommended children receive three shots of a Covid-19 vaccine — two doses of the original formulation and a bivalent dose at least two months following their last shot.

— House hearing airs ethics allegations against Supreme Court: House Democrats blasted the Supreme Court over alleged ethical lapses today, mounting a hearing that showcased a religious-right lobbying campaign aimed at the justices and claims of an alleged leak from the court of a key decision in 2014. At a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, a former evangelical minister who organized the lobbying effort, the Rev. Robert Schenck, detailed his efforts to deploy wealthy social conservatives as “stealth missionaries” to befriend conservative justices.

— Republicans frustrated with mail voting resistance: As Republicans come to terms with their lackluster midterm performance, top GOP officials and conservative luminaries are acknowledging voters were led astray with calls to reject early and absentee voting. Privately, there is a growing sense of alarm among the GOP ranks that the conspiracy theories Donald Trump pushed about early voting and mail ballots not only hurt them dearly in the just completed midterms, but could take multiple election cycles to remedy.

FREE AT LAST — The White House has secured the release of American basketball star Brittney Griner, Biden announced today, confirming that the U.S. sent arms trafficker Viktor Bout to Russia in exchange, write Jonathan Lemire, Eugene Daniels and Alexander Ward.

In the last few weeks, according to reporting, Biden was presented with a one-or-none choice: Bring Brittney Griner home now, or risk leaving both her and fellow American Paul Whelan in Russian custody.

So Biden made the “very painful decision” to release a man charged with conspiring to kill Americans to secure the basketball star’s release, a senior administration official said.

A U.S. official said Griner and Bout walked past each other on the tarmac at the Abu Dhabi airport on their way to exchanging planes.

The prisoner swap, conducted at Abu Dhabi airport, ends a brutal 10 months for Griner, who Russian authorities arrested in February for possession of vape cartridges containing hash oil. She was sentenced in August to nine years in prison and was recently sent to a penal colony 300 miles outside of Moscow.

GETTING NERVOUS — Early Wednesday, thousands of balaclava-clad German police officers fanned out across the country, arresting 25 people and seizing weapons to upend what authorities described as a diabolical plot to overthrow the country’s government and reinstate the monarchy. The group’s “military arm” was surreptitiously building “a new German army,” the lead prosecutor on the case said.

A day later, however, the case looks more like the script of a Monty Python episode than a sequel to the Day of the Jackal, writes Matthew Karnitschnig.

The alleged ringleader was Prince Heinrich XIII Reuß, the long-haired scion of an 800-year-old aristocratic line, who police said organized conspiratorial meetings at his hilltop Schloss in rural Thuringia.

The 71-year-old prince and his alleged co-conspirators, a number of them retirees, assembled a formidable arsenal that, according to police, included at least one crossbow, a slingshot, swords, as well as hunting rifles of unclear vintage and pistols.

The fact that many Germans fear a coup reveals more about the fragile state of the national psyche at the moment than the stability of the country’s democratic institutions. Ever since the end of World War II, Germans have lived according to the motto “wehret den Anfängen” (resist the beginnings), taking it, as they do much else, very literally. Those beginnings, no matter how little they present a real threat, still concern many Germans.

Read about Germany’s anxiety — and how a combination of the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and Europe’s energy crisis has set the country on edge.

ALTERNATE THERAPIES — Are we getting long Covid all wrong? A woman named Maxanne McCormick was sick with a degenerative disease, until she discovered the concept of a functional neurological disorder, or FND: the idea that the brain can have a processing problem that leads to illness. FND patients can rehab parts of their brain — for McCormick, it led to a recovery that was nothing short of miraculous. But not everyone is on board; some patients with so-called contested illnesses, which include chronic lyme disease and more recently long Covid, argue that this sort of therapy is tantamount to being told the disease is all in their head. The question remains — if they’re sick, does it matter why? And can new, alternative therapies focused on the brain help to cure patients? Natalie Shure reports for The New Republic.