Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tina Nguyen, and I’ve been checking in with my conservative sources in between recording the audiobook for The MAGA Diaries. (Obligatory shilling: Pre-order it here.)

This year, I’m thankful that there’s a blessed weeklong intermission in the never-ending drama that is the G.O.P. House of Representatives. Unfortunately, I’m here to give you a preview of what’s in store when everyone returns next week, including an informed breakdown of why there’s MAGA resistance to Mike Johnson, even if they acknowledge that he’s a true believer. Read it, absorb these concepts, and then I implore you: Forget about them for the weekend. Stuff your face with autumnal delights. Watch some football. Run a local 5K. Embrace your loved ones. Then—and only then—come back to this newsletter on Monday. Trust me, you’ll be glad you did.

But first, the latest chatter on the Hill from our congressional correspondent, Abby Livingston…

• Democrats’ Most Wanted [Or: Eight Mile Angst]: While the administration’s Israel policy appears to be contributing to Biden’s polling woes, with many young progressives bucking party orthodoxy, the pro-Palestinian wing is incurring massive financial pushback from the Democratic donor class, which is organizing primary challenges to a number of Squad members. In Michigan, Politico reports that a Democratic donor offered actor Hill Harper $20 million in campaign support to drop his Senate bid and run against Rashida Tlaib, a lightning rod for her highly controversial public statements on the war.

  The money supposedly would have been delivered in two bundles: $10 million in independent expenditures, and another $10 million that would be bundled hard money. That’s a staggering sum for a congressional race, where individual campaign donations are limited to $3,300 per primary and general election. Granted, donors and campaigns continue to find legally creative ways to skirt these laws, but the back-of-the-envelope math indicates that anyone promising to bundle $10 million needs to bring at least 1,500 completely maxed-out donors into the fold. Even so, AIPAC appears prepared to spend big on these kinds of races. Harper, whose personal offer came from a major AIPAC donor, declined.

• The Chicago Three: Bigger picture, the Harper offer is likely the mere beginning of this political fight. Besides Tlaib, three other House progressives may face serious primary challenges for their Palestinian support: Cori Bush of Missouri, Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. What’s striking about this lineup is that three of the four potential state primaries (Michigan, Minnesota, and Missouri) will take place in August, just weeks ahead of the party’s Chicago convention—when Democratic leaders will be doing their damnedest to get the party consolidated behind Biden, the all-but-certain Democratic standard-bearer in 2024. Then again, primary threats don’t always pan out. The biggest variable in taking down an incumbent is finding a quality recruit.

• No Vacancy: Meanwhile, the retirement merry-go-round continues in Washington. Former House chief of staff Celeste Maloy will be coming back to Congress as a member after her Tuesday night special election victory to succeed Chris Stewart in Utah, following in the footsteps of Democrat Gabe Amo, who recently won the Rhode Island special election to replace David Cicilline. Neither seat was competitive. What is interesting, however, is the common thread between Maloy and Amo: Both are seasoned political staffers. Maloy spent years on the Hill as Stewart’s counsel, while Amo is an Obama and Biden administration alum.

  Once Maloy is sworn in, the House will finally have no vacancies on either side. But not for long: Ohio Rep. Bill Johnson announced on Tuesday that he would eventually resign from Congress (cue the music…) to become a college president. And on the horizon, keep an eye on the Houston mayoral race, where Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is in a tough runoff. If she wins on Dec. 9, she’ll vacate her House seat, setting up yet another special election. Interestingly, the state’s filing deadline is Dec.13, meaning she has a four-day window to contemplate staying put in the 18th District if she loses.

Alas, first they must deal with another inescapable reality of electoral politics: their constituents. “It’s good they are home to rest, but not good that their bases get them riled up,” one Republican lobbyist close to the Freedom Caucus warned me. He was proven right the very next day, when Chip Roy sent out a fundraising blast to his supporters citing a viral floor speech he delivered last week, begging his colleagues to “name one thing” that they’d delivered for conservatives. “When are we going to do what we said we would do?” he asked.

And indeed, that’s the immediate challenge that will be facing Johnson when everyone returns to Washington on Tuesday for the last three weeks before Christmas: delivering one major legislative win for the hard-line factions, if only to prevent any more embarrassing legislative blockages that might result in him being tossed on the ash heap of his G.O.P. predecessors.

Military aid for Israel is front and center, but no one I spoke with dared make any predictions as to whether that would pass smoothly or not, or which lawmakers might turn that debate into another hostage negotiation. (“Is anything simple these days?” the Freedom Caucus source asked rhetorically.) And even after that’s done, there’s the matter of the 12 government funding bills that Johnson has split into two tranches, set to expire in January and February, respectively.

Johnson allies are hoping that by splitting the bills into two segments with different deadlines (the easier ones first, the difficult ones later), they’ll buy enough time to hammer out a budget that both appeases Republicans and wins enough support from Democrats to pass both the House and Senate. But the fact remains that Johnson can’t afford to lose more than four Republican votes—three, if New York Rep. George Santos is expelled in December—unless he plans to make common cause with Hakeem Jeffries. (And then there’s still the Democratic Senate and White House to contend with.) Meanwhile, last week, 19 Republican hard-liners essentially threatened to jam up the process again—unless, that is, the speaker stops passing “clean” continuing resolutions that are chock-full of concessions to Democrats. (Compromise, as it used to be called.)

It might sound bizarre, but this truly is the MAGA version of a love tap: a gentle little reminder that they’re giving Johnson the space to figure out the budget, but that he has to acknowledge their demands in exchange for their continued support. And, perhaps counter-intuitively, this is a relatively good sign for Johnson: Matt Gaetz et al. may be individually warning him that they’ve still got their finger on the “motion to vacate” trigger, but nobody has yet drafted anything (or left the paperwork in a House bathroom, as Gaetz previously did). “He’s gonna have to execute more of the agenda, but he’s in a tremendously powerful position,” said Roger Stone, the notorious former Trump adviser, onetime felon, conservative operative, Jan. 6 power player, and all-around MAGA Mephistopheles. “Remember the immediate comparisons to McCarthy, who delivered on nothing? All you got from him was happy talk.”

But while releasing Jan. 6 footage was something Johnson could do unilaterally, Congress itself remains an arena in which people have to compromise in order to get things done. (That is, after all, the point of representative government.) The protest vote that 19 Republicans took last week, tanking a vote that would have opened debate on a relatively simple spending bill, illustrates the difficult, ongoing dynamic between the party and party activists. As I reported last week, Johnson’s “laddered” C.R. might have been clever, but it was also viewed as “gimmicky”—a procedural magic trick that favored Democrats by delaying a budgetary day of reckoning.

To the extent that Republicans are still allowing Johnson some latitude, their open-mindedness mostly stems from the fact that Johnson is not McCarthy, who was perceived as an opportunist more than an ideologue. Gaetz, for instance, was sore over how McCarthy treated him after reports emerged that he was being investigated for child trafficking (he was ultimately not indicted). Tim Burchett, who’d also voted McCarthy out, said that McCarthy had insulted his personal faith.

The rift hasn’t been helped by McCarthy’s post-speakership grudge tour, which he’s spent badmouthing Gaetz and Nancy Mace on CNN, literally shoving Burchett in front of journalists, and even suggesting that Gaetz should be kicked out of Congress, Santos-style. For now, at least, McCarthy’s antics have validated for the hard-liners why they’re better off with Johnson. “They were unhappy with Trump’s support of [Kevin]. They were unhappy with his election. They were unhappy with his performance. He has no real friends in the MAGA movement,” Stone said. “And now he wants to expel Matt Gaetz?”

But even if Johnson masters the inside game, he faces a unique challenge that’s been mostly unexplored so far: the outside pressure from the base to deliver a budget as close to 100 percent purity as possible. As a reminder, the hard asks are: increased border funding, no money for Ukraine, and cutting federal spending down to pre-Covid levels, ideally by jettisoning all that pesky I.R.S. and diversity program funding.

Right wing media influencers have already drawn their lines in the sand, with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon openly discussing whether Johnson should stay in office if he throws conservatives under the bus for the sake of passing a budget. Kirk and Bannon hold powerful positions inside the MAGA wing of the G.O.P.: Kirk runs TPUSA, a hybrid student activist group, media company, and get-out-the-vote organization that can easily mobilize thousands of volunteers; Bannon, who has re-established himself as a populist firebrand post-Breitbart and hosts the conservative podcast War Room, played a major role in ousting McCarthy. And last week, both of them were furious at what they saw as Johnson’s capitulation to Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. “We had this amazing opportunity where the regime had an ask, and their ask was a demand more than an ask right, Steve? We want time off for Thanksgiving and Christmas, period,” Kirk fumed on his radio show, adding that Johnson should have made the House work through New Year’s in order to get a proper, non-C.R. bill passed. “Instead, Mike Johnson said, ‘Here you go, Chuck Schumer, would you like me to polish it for you?’… In some ways, what Speaker Johnson is doing is even worse than McCarthy.”

Stone, now a radio host who still holds ties to Mar-a-Lago and various segments of the MAGA world, wasn’t ready to go that far. “How long has he been speaker? Three weeks?” he said, adding that he liked Johnson and hadn’t heard too much anger from his corners of the movement. But he did warn that additional funding for Ukraine, “for which there is just no appetite among Republicans,” would be Johnson’s Rubicon, and not just from the hard-line flank. “In the beginning, [support for Ukraine] was almost monolithic. It was only the Rand Paul, Roger Stone-type Republicans who were skeptical,” he noted, self-referentially. “Johnson’s move in that direction, I think, is feeding some skepticism among the base about the new speaker.”