Winning. (Annie Leibovitz / Vanity Fair)

Serena Williams let John McEnroe have it in the best way possible Monday evening.

Williams served up two flaming tweets that deftly singed McEnroe for saying “if she played the men’s circuit, she’d be like 700 in the world.” And, in case he missed her point about female empowerment, maybe McEnroe can pick up a copy of Vanity Fair, which features the nude and pregnant Williams on the cover.

“Dear John I adore and respect you but please please keep me out of your statements that are not factually based,” she tweeted. “I’ve never played anyone ranked ‘there’ nor do I have time. Respect me and my privacy as I’m trying to have a baby. Good day sir.”

Never mind that the images, taken by Annie Leibovitz, pretty much strip away the vestiges of privacy; Serena’s on a roll.

McEnroe made his comments in an interview Sunday with NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro. The seven-time major singles champion is trying to sell his “But Seriously” memoir and revived a “Battle of the Sexes” narrative that most people would have considered long dead. Garcia-Navarro asked why McEnroe would qualify statement by calling Williams the best female player in the world. That was chum in the water.

“Oh!” McEnroe replied. “Uh, she’s not, you mean, the best player in the world, period?”

“Yeah, the best tennis player in the world,” Garcia-Navarro said. “You know, why say female player?”

[McEnroe: If Serena played the men’s circuit…]

“Well, because if she was in, if she played the men’s circuit she’d be like 700 in the world,” McEnroe said. ” … That doesn’t mean I don’t think Serena is an incredible player. I do, but the reality of what would happen would be I think something that perhaps it’d be a little higher, perhaps it’d be a little lower. And on a given day, Serena could beat some players. I believe because she’s so incredibly strong mentally that she could overcome some situations where players would choke ’cause she’s been in it so many times, so many situations at Wimbledon, The U.S. Open, etc. But if she had to just play the circuit — the men’s circuit — that would be an entirely different story.”

McEnroe is right, of course, but … who cares? Think McEnroe could win the Australian Open in the searing heat of Melbourne while pregnant? Both are silly debates, truly deserving of “you cannot be serious.” Buzz Bissinger, author of the Vanity Fair piece, calls Serena the best tennis player in history, with her aggregate winning percentage of 85.76 percent and 72 tournament victories. She has, he points out, earned more than $84 million in prize money and nearly twice that in endorsements and appearance fees. In the early stages of pregnancy, she didn’t drop a set as she won all seven matches at the Australian Open.

How great is she? How does one quantify greatness and how does gender fit in? It’s a subject Williams has considered before. Now 35, she is increasingly aware that what remains of an athletic career that began when she was a child is approaching its end. Taking stock of the social and racial landscape, she’s assessing her place in it and as part of that, she knows just how different the debate about whether she is one of sports’ all-time greats might be if only …

“I think if I were a man, I would have been in that conversation a long time ago,” Williams said last December in an interview with rapper Common for ESPN’s “The Undefeated.” “I think being a woman is just a whole new set of problems from society that you have to deal with, as well as being black, so it’s a lot to deal with — and especially lately. I’ve been able to speak up for women’s rights because I think that gets lost in color, or gets lost in cultures. Women make up so much of this world, and, yeah, if I were a man, I would have 100 percent been considered the greatest ever a long time ago.”

[Forty-four years after the ‘Battle of the Sexes,’ a dumb debate rages on]

As part of the journey of 2016, Williams wrote an open letter “to all incredible women who strive for excellence” in which she urged them to “dream big” and concluded:

As we know, women have to break down many barriers on the road to success. One of those barriers is the way we are constantly reminded we are not men, as if it is a flaw. People call me one of the “world’s greatest female athletes.” Do they say LeBron is one of the world’s best male athletes? Is Tiger? Federer? Why not? They are certainly not female. We should never let this go unchallenged. We should always be judged by our achievements, not by our gender.

For everything I’ve achieved in my life, I am profoundly grateful to have experienced the highs and lows that come with success. It is my hope that my story, and yours, will inspire all young women out there to push for greatness and follow their dreams with steadfast resilience. We must continue to dream big, and in doing so, we empower the next generation of women to be just as bold in their pursuits.

Let it be noted that McEnroe called Williams “arguably the greatest athlete of the last 100 years” when she won Wimbledon in 2015 and also note that he didn’t qualify that based on gender. So whatever his point was, Serena countered it effectively, with the Vanity Fair cover as an exclamation point. Take that.

THE TICKER

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). (AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell knows a lengthy process sours public support for a major legislative undertaking. People don’t like to watch the ugly horse-trading necessary to build consensus in Congress. The longer lawmakers engage in it, the more they postpone the public marketing campaign that follows. The Kentucky Republican harnessed that principle eight years ago, marshaling his then-meager minority in the Senate to do everything possible to string out the Democratic-led project of assembling the Affordable Care Act. 

As McConnell tries to undo that law with a bare majority this week, he may be demonstrating an equal and opposite principle: Speed kills. The accelerated schedule he adopted for forging the Senate GOP’s repeal-and-replace measure cut not just Democrats but also most of his own conference out of the drafting. So Monday night, after the Congressional Budget Office said the measure would cost 22 million people their insurance coverage over a decade, Republicans previously confined to the sidelines declared sufficient opposition to throw its future into doubt. 

That may be precisely the point. As the old business wisdom goes, sometimes a « fast no » is better than a « slow maybe. » And investors have been losing patience with an all-GOP government’s inability to execute on its first priority, mostly because it has stalled progress on its second one. That is, the stuttering health-care debate is holding up action on a wholesale rewiring of the tax code, which, if successful, could translate into an immediate economic boost. 

Charles Koch. (Credit: The Seminar Network)

Deep-pocketed conservative donors gathered for a Koch network retreat in Colorado over the weekend expressed their frustration over so-far fruitless tax talks directly to Republican lawmakers. “More than anything else, the network wants a comprehensive rewrite of the tax code completed while Republicans have unified control of government,” my colleague James Hohmann writes in a dispatch from the confab. 

The network is primed to put grass roots muscle into the effort. Americans for Prosperity, the Koch’s political arm, plans to mobilize in 36 states over the summer to press Members of Congress for a tax overhaul. 

Meanwhile, at least one donor at the conference declared his intention to hit lawmakers where it hurts. Doug Deason, a donor from Texas, said he’s refusing to do any more fundraising for congressional Republicans until they start delivering some results, and he’s encouraging fellow conservative moneymen to follow suit. « Get Obamacare repealed and replaced, get tax reform passed, » Deason said, according to the Associated Press. « You control the Senate. You control the House. You have the presidency. There’s no reason you can’t get this done. Get it done and we’ll open it back up.”

Given the mounting pressure from the donor crowd — and the toxic politics of the health-care repeal drive — Congressional watchers are speculating that McConnell wants the package to collapse so he can move on: 

Adds another congressional reporter: 

The New York Post’s opinion editor is all but rooting for the outcome:

After they don’t pass this bill this week can we move on to something like tax reform

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) June 26, 2017

The view underestimates McConnell’s aversion to losing a high-stakes fight. Consider this peek behind the veil of a programmatically reticent leader, courtesy of Josh Holmes, his former chief of staff: “He absolutely refuses to lose. It’s that Michael Jordan-like intensity that just keeps him charging ahead when almost everyone else would throw up their hands.” 

Plus, McConnell was the architect of the Republican strategy to oppose Obamacare at every turn. He first convened GOP senators to rally them against it back in late November 2008 — just weeks after Obama won the presidency, two months before he was even inaugurated, and in the midst of an economic crisis that demanded a bipartisan emergency response. McConnell has doubled down with each election since, organizing congressional Republicans’ electoral message around a renewed pledge to dismantle the law. Back in March, he said with Republicans fully in power, the time had come to deliver. 

“When you have a president of a different party, you can freelance all you want to,” McConnell told Politico at the time. “But now we have an actual chance to change the country. We have somebody who will sign legislation that we pass. We need to get into a governing mode and start thinking about actually achieving something rather than just kind of sparring.”

It’s easier to block than to build. But as McConnell knows well, too, a tax rewrite presents it’s own challenges. If Republicans can’t figure how to work together now, changing the subject may not fix what ails them.

Read more from my colleague Paige Winfield Cunningham in The Health 202 today.

— The health-care debate continues to all but blot out the sun in Washington this week. At least four Senate Republicans have declared their opposition to even starting debate on the health-care measure. Others in the GOP are training their fire on the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan agency that produced the analysis of the bill.

The budget scorekeeper found that under the Senate bill, a poor person in 2026 could face a deductible that costs more than half their income. And Senate Republican leaders added a provision Monday that would force consumers to wait six months before re-enrolling if they let their insurance lapse, eliciting new objections from patient advocates. 

My colleagues Bob Costa and Sean Sullivan write that the issue will test the durability of the McConnell-Trump alliance.  

— BREAKING this morning: The E.U. just slapped Google with a record $2.7 billion fine, saying it illegally steering users toward its comparison shopping site. Google is expected to appeal. 

— The White House is hung up filling three empty slots on the Federal Reserve board because it can’t find a pick with community banking experience who wants job, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Trump administration wants to move the nominees as a package, but a divestiture requirement is turning off would-be candidates. The situation is keeping Trump from installing a vice chair for supervision, a key to advancing his deregulatory agenda. 

A traditional dhow floats in the Corniche Bay of Doha, Qatar. (AP Photo/Saurabh Das, File)

— More on the study linked here yesterday that showed Seattle’s minimum wage hike is hurting worker pay: Max Ehrenfreund writes, in short, that it looks credible. But the research has not been peer reviewed yet and won’t end the debate over pay mandates.

— The Post’s Ana Swanson writes that the trade embargo with Qatar could cause destabilizing shortages of helium, used in medical imaging, technology manufacturing and nuclear reactors. In 2015, the country provided 27.2 percent of the global supply of helium, and is the second largest source of the ultralight gas, tied with Iran, and trailing the United States, which has more than a third of the global resources for helium. But the oil and gas fields mostly in Kansas and Oklahoma will not be able to increase production in order to meet the need created by the halt in production in Qatar.

Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT) is surrounded by reporters. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

— Senate Finance Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) tells Fox Business News that the Trump administration is willing to accept a higher corporate rate than the 15 percent target they’ve proposed. He said a rate between 20-25 percent would provide a meaningful economic lift. His comments come as some tax experts now think a 28 percent corporate may be the best that congressional Republicans can muster from a tax rewrite, given how little progress toward a fundamental overhaul of the code they’ve made so far.

In the House, Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) says he’s planning two more hearings on the subject in July, focused on the benefits of a rewrite for small businesses, individuals and families. 

— More than half of American voters would blame both Republicans and Democrats for a government shutdown, according to a new Harvard-Harris Poll.

The poll’s findings, published Monday by The Hill, show that 58 percent of voters would blame both parties equally, 20 percent would blame just Democrats and a slightly higher 23 percent would blame just Republicans. And a large majority of the respondents are against Congress raising the debt ceiling. 

A news assistant runs outside the U.S. Supreme Court. (REUTERS/Yuri Gripas TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY)

— The Supreme Court has decided to consider whether corporate whistleblowers are protected by anti-retaliation laws if they report misconduct internally rather than to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The high court will hear an appeal of San Francisco-based company Digital Realty Trust Inc., in October, Reuters reported. The company argues that the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act did not protect a fired former employee who reported misconduct because he did not report the wrongdoing to the Securities and Exchange commission. The fired employee did report the misconduct internally.

A ruling in favor of the company could mean corporate whistleblowers would have to contact the SEC before reporting issues internally in order to be protected by the law. 

From The Post’s Philip Bump: Tip for saving money under the Senate health-care bill: Don’t be old

Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)

Today

• The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies will hold a hearing with Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta on the department’s budget request.
• The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government will hold a hearing on the 2018 budget request for the SEC and CFTC.
• The House Financial Services Committee will have a hearing on equity market structure.
• The USTR will hold a hearing on NAFTA renegotiation.

Coming Up

• The House Financial Services Committee will have a hearing on “The Federal Reserve’s Impact on Main Street, Retirees, and Savings” on Wednesday.
• The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation will hold a nomination hearing Wednesday for Steven Gill Bradbury to be General Counsel of the Department of Transportation and Elizabeth Erin Walsh to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Director General of the United States Foreign Commercial Service.
• The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs will have an open session hearing on housing finance reform on Thursday.

From The Post’s Tom Toles:

What’s in the CBO report on the Senate health-care plan: 

‘Pharma bro’ Martin Shkreli is on trial for securities fraud: 

The Post’s Robert Barnes explains the Supreme Court decision to consider whether gerrymandered election maps in Wisconsin violate the Constitution: 

What are McMansions, the houses that people love to hate:

Seth Meyers on the CBO score for the Senate GOP’s health plan: