Hello and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tina Nguyen.

Obligatory preorder shilling for my upcoming memoir, The MAGA Diaries, but with an update: I spent most of the Thanksgiving holiday recording the audiobook! If you’d prefer to hear me read the book out loud to you (and frankly, it might be more fun that way), it’ll be available along with the ebook and dead tree version on January 16.

But first, the latest chatter around Capitol Hill, via my partner Abby Livingston…

• M.T.G. Targets: Marjorie Taylor Greene appears intent on resurrecting the potential impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s secretary of Homeland Security. When House Democrats (and more reluctantly, their leadership) launched their own impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump in 2019, they were keenly aware of the presidential campaign calendar and were anxious to wrap things up as early as possible. Everybody in Washington remembers how Republicans overreached in impeaching Bill Clinton, and how they paid the price in the 1998 midterms. It would be some high-stakes gambling to go down this path in the new year, just as presidential primary voting begins.
• Hunter and Hunted: Meanwhile, over at the Oversight Committee, Chairman James Comer appears to have weakened the Republican case for impeachment by rejecting Hunter Biden’s offer (via his new lawyer, Abbe Lowell) to testify in public. Closed-door depositions aren’t unprecedented—this is exactly how House Democrats preceded public testimony during Trump’s first impeachment. But wouldn’t House Republicans leap at the chance to put Hunter in front of cameras if they were confident in their argument? After all, congressional hearings are the best tool for making the case to the public in an investigation. (See: John Dean, Cassidy Hutchinson, and they weren’t even hostile witnesses…)
• The Timing of It All…: Trying to land these blows in the middle of a presidential campaign might seem an ideal strategy for House Republicans, but that simply hasn’t been the historical precedent. Interest in congressional investigations and policymaking plummets once the presidential and down-ballot primaries begin. A presidential campaign tends to block out all other political news, and members will soon become consumed with their own political survival and that of their colleagues once their primaries begin. Sure, one could argue that a cabinet member impeachment or investigation into a presidential relative might become part of that storyline, but these plays feel stubborn and ad hoc, or worse.

  On top of all this, the House may have to deal with another potential shutdown in January, or at the very least, the threat of a shutdown, which always seems to suck all the energy out of the Congress. And there remains other must-pass legislation like the Farm Bill. There is only so much bandwidth that the political system, and voters’ attention, can muster.

Johnson has kept his right flank placated, for now, with some carefully curated shiny objects. On the Friday before Thanksgiving, the speaker announced that he would release more than 44,000 hours of raw footage from the January 6 riot—a longtime demand in MAGA land—and on Wednesday he signaled during a press conference that House Republicans are ready to push ahead with their Biden impeachment inquiry after uncovering “alarming” evidence (none of which they have yet made public).

But even with the extra time Johnson bought himself to hammer out the 2024 budget, there’s a sense that not enough is happening. Multiple weeks of the legislative calendar were wasted during last month’s drawn-out speaker fight. And as of now, there are no plans to move appropriations bills this week. Indeed, much of the G.O.P. headspace has been consumed by whether to expel serial fabulist George Santos. (The vote must take place by Friday, and Johnson, having failed to convince Santos to resign, has told members to vote their conscience.)

Meanwhile, House leadership has not fully shaken the threat that a handful of hardliners—Chip Roy, Michael Cloud, and Matt Rosendale were among the names I heard—could hijack the debate by essentially taking Johnson and the appropriations process hostage. (As Matt Gaetz frequently admonishes, it only takes one member to initiate a no-confidence vote.) Currently, all eyes are on Roy, the former chief of staff to O.G. shutdown artist Ted Cruz and a major power player inside the hardliner caucus. While Roy was a key part of the effort to derail McCarthy’s initial quest for the speaker’s gavel back in January, what differentiated him from the rest of the holdouts was his nearly singular focus on procedure and slashing government spending. After the last clean C.R. was passed, he delivered a viral, hourlong floor speech wherein he blasted Republicans for being “too cowardly” to fight for conservative provisions.

The recent Thanksgiving break did little to calm him down. On Tuesday, Roy published a blistering op-ed in the Washington Examiner calling for two “lines in the sand.” First, he demanded that the House slash year-over-year spending without “side deals” that would allow for extra spending above budget caps. Second, that Republicans not begin any debate on Ukraine funding without Biden promising: 1) total transparency on where the money is going, and 2) signing H.R. 2, “the strongest border security measure ever to pass a body of Congress,” as he described it. Roy added that he would not accept a “watered-down” version of the bill from the Senate. “The speaker should make clear such a bad ‘deal’ will be dead on arrival in the House,” he wrote.

That’s bad news for Johnson, whose control over the House may grow even more tenuous this very week. With Santos expected to be expelled—the whip count, per Politico, stands at 75 hard G.O.P. yeses, likely clearing the two-thirds majority that Democrats need—his majority will shrink to eight. That’s a small enough vote margin for any number of MAGA hardliners to, once again, hold the conference hostage if their demands aren’t met.

The most likely explanation is that she’s managed to gather the type of momentum that her main rival, DeSantis, has yet to demonstrate he can. “He’s stalled, she’s still moving up, and they feel the non-Trump support needs to consolidate behind one candidate, i.e. Nikki,” said a source familiar with AFP’s rationale. “And separate from ideology, Nikki is doing best.” Which, if you look at the numbers, is technically true: DeSantis has been treading water while Haley has risen. (Trump, of course, is up 30-ish points in Iowa, more than 20 points in New Hampshire, and has an indomitable 50-ish point lead nationwide.)

The confusion appears to be endemic inside his organization, too. “There’s so many different internal tensions within the DeSantis camp,” the former staffer explained. “And I think it probably manifests itself in the campaign, too, where you’ve got the Never Trump-type people, and then you’ve got the ‘disappointed in Trump’-type people, and they’re both voting for the same candidate, but for totally different reasons. It’s a totally different thesis appealing to each type of voter and, and when they try to appeal to both of those voters at the same time, it sounds silly.”

This may explain, in part, why AFP ultimately chose to throw its weight behind Haley, a true Trump alternative, rather than DeSantis, a less charismatic Trump mini-me who has struggled to escape the former president’s shadow. In short, AFP is attempting to make an impact with voters that it views as genuinely persuadable—but it’s not clear whether they’ve read the base correctly.

After all, if the profile of the median DeSantis voter is someone who’s looking for a Trump-esque figure sans legal baggage, that’s also precisely the type of anti-establishment, anti-woke voter who’d likely re-embrace Trump if given the opportunity. “I think DeSantis voters would fly back to [support] Trump to stop Haley,” one G.O.P. consultant told me. “If Haley dropped out, they would have to go with Ron because a lot [of them] just don’t like Trump.”