Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tina Nguyen.

We’re just days away from a few major moments politically: the Iowa caucuses, wherein an ice blizzard might provide a last-minute twist; a looming government shutdown; another defenestration threat to Mike Johnson (more on that below); and—exciting!—the release of my memoir about my early years as a right-wing activist and journalist, The MAGA Diaries, which drops on Tuesday (you can preorder here). Or, if you want to hear more about it, Tara Palmeri and I went deep into it on this week’s episode of Somebody’s Gotta Win.

More in tonight’s edition about the shutdown negotiation nightmare confronting Johnson. But first… here’s Tara Palmeri on Christie dropping out…

• Christie’s No Labels flirtation: Chris Christie finally dropped out of the race today with a hot mic moment that made it clear that he would not be endorsing any other candidate. Christie has been under pressure to exit for some time, even from his allies, who reminded him how the Acela corridor would view his legacy if he inadvertently torpedoed the only viable non-Trump candidate.

  With Nikki Haley trailing Trump by single digits in New Hampshire, the hope was that if Christie dropped out, she would absorb at least 10 points from his anti-Trump constituency, giving her the edge. But upon his exit, Christie refused to endorse Haley or any of the other candidates, instead saying into a hot mic: “She’s going to get smoked, you and I both know this. She’s not up to this.” Of course, Christie has been highly resistant to shuttering his campaign, running a seven-figure ad buy last month saying that he wouldn’t get out of the race.

  So what now? I’ve heard that Christie’s political advisers and top donors have spoken to No Labels leadership, although Christie, himself, has not spoken to the third-party group. (“Sore loser” laws might prevent him from coming back and running under a different banner, anyway.) Plus, Christie has been pretty hostile to No Labels. The 501(c)4 is still divided over whether a Democrat or a Republican should lead their unity ticket, but they seem to believe they need a Republican to stop Trump. (The names Jon Huntsman, Larry Hogan, and Mitt Romney have been floated for the top of the ticket; before that, there was an open infatuation with Joe Manchin.) For more on the Christie dropout, I recorded an emergency episode of Somebody’s Gotta Win with my partner Teddy Schleifer. —Tara Palmeri

• Mike Johnson had a no good, very bad day, but it may not be his fault. Sure, a collapsed floor vote is the number one sign of an issue in leadership, but he inherited an impossible set of problems. For all the ink spilled on the political and personal weaknesses of Kevin McCarthy, today’s outing made clear that this is an ungovernable House Republican conference, unable to manage even small things—like run a normal hearing, or sustainably fund the government—let alone accomplish the big, historical goals like impeaching a Cabinet member or “shutting down the border.”

  Things will not get easier for Johnson. The problems facing Congress are all interconnected—one day it looks like some sort of border deal will be tied to Ukraine funding, the next day it seems like it’ll be married to funding the government. And the great fear is that if a government shutdown comes to pass, Republican leaders don’t have the leverage they had during the 2013 shutdown to actually get out of this one. Regardless, how does this Congress negotiate a border deal—an issue that has bedeviled every Congress since at least 2006—or fund Ukraine, or run an impeachment amid a shutdown? Moreover, primary season is here. If some incumbents lose their nominations in contentious primaries, it seems certain that interpersonal tensions among House Republicans will only escalate.

• Rather than practice their customary habit of West Wing-style smugness, Democrats were as stunned as everyone else with what they saw on Wednesday. A former House Democratic chief bluntly summed the day up: “It’s easy against these clowns.”

  Things got so wild at the Oversight hearing that Jamie Raskin compared it to a Jerry Springer episode, and no one seemed inclined to accuse the Democratic ranking member of hyperbole. One former House Republican leadership staffer blamed the behavior on the conference’s permissiveness toward consistently bizarre public tantrums among House Republicans. This former staffer told me it’s “fair to say that because bad behavior is no longer punished, more of the ‘children’ are acting up.”

While incremental, his wins were definitionally conservative. But, as one plugged-in Republican close to the House’s conservative wing told me, it is “not enough for the Freedom Caucus.” Alas, this is 2024, and the number of right-wing grievances has snowballed since Johnson published his “7 Core Principles”: trillions of dollars for Covid relief, authorized by Trump and then Biden; the American Rescue Plan; the Inflation Reduction Act; and finally and most egregiously, the aforementioned deal then-Speaker McCarthy struck with Democrats that largely maintains historically high levels of spending.

So on Wednesday, when Johnson walked his conference through the contours of his deal with Schumer, his right flank revolted. “Drivel,” said Rep. Warren Davidson, who described the terms as “surrender.” Rep. Chip Roy has already suggested that Johnson, like McCarthy before him, could face a vote of no confidence. And on Wednesday afternoon, 13 hardline members, including Roy, began their assault on the budget, voting against a rule to consider debate on the bills in the budget—effectively grinding the process to a halt.

Viewed through “D.C. math goggles,” as one MAGA-aligned aide described it to me, the Johnson-Schumer deal makes a certain amount of sense for most normie Republicans: Yes, Democrats get their bills funded, but Republicans can technically say they decreased the overall topline spending through $16 billion in offsets, and more importantly, it keeps the government open. But in Freedom Caucus math, this current proposed budget is $30 billion more than the bill initially proposed by Nancy Pelosi for FY23. “It’s actually bad, if not worse, than what we would have got in a different deal,” the aide said.

Of course, it’s unclear how the Freedom Caucus would have attempted to negotiate this deal themselves. There is, after all, still a Democratic majority in the Senate and another Democrat—the one holding the veto pen—in the White House. Without some kind of deal, or even a shorter-term continuing resolution, parts of the government will begin shutting down on January 19.

But while these Republicans privately acknowledge that it would be impossible to dial back spending to their desired, pre-Covid levels while Biden is in the White House—“I love living on Fantasy Island, but that ain’t gonna happen,” a senior G.O.P. aide told me—a significant number of hardliners are prepared to go nuclear. Among their demands are an extended, long-term C.R. that freezes spending at last year’s levels, potentially in addition to the cuts Johnson negotiated with Schumer, through the end of the year—not the most ideal ask for a Freedom Caucus member, but in their minds, still better than the one Johnson brought back to his conference. They also want Johnson to commit to not watering down H.R.2, the comprehensive border control bill already voted out of the House, which includes funding for border barriers and makes significant changes to the asylum process.

If Johnson does not deliver, or appears to cave to Democrats, two potential options are on the table. The first is to instigate a two-week shutdown in protest, commencing on January 19, which was set into motion earlier today by the 13 holdouts. Failing that, Roy, Johnson’s loudest critic, has privately told allies that he reserves the right to call a motion to vacate, leading to yet another leadership election. “It’s war,” the Republican close to the conservative wing told me.

Johnson himself voted against the previous McCarthy budget last September, after all, so it’s no wonder that his pitch—that he now has to make similarly pragmatic choices as speaker—is rubbing hardliners the wrong way. “What this deal does is, it allows those things [from the previous C.R.] to continue on,” a senior G.O.P. aide told me. “What changed that made it conservative to oppose it in 2022, and now it’s conservative to keep those going at their current levels? Everyone knows full repeal is not going to happen as long as Joe Biden’s in the White House. But you can defund parts of it, or you can make it your mission. Maybe, you know, don’t give it more money.”

Not that Johnson hasn’t been trying to build bridges with his ideological critics: He has a staffer, Eric Schmitz, doing outreach to the conservative activist groups outside the Hill, and winning a few of them over. He’s also constantly in contact with the conservative budget hawks, including Roy, Andy Clyde, and Andy Biggs, as well as MAGA hellraisers like Matt Gaetz. The courtship has been nice—it’s certainly more face time than McCarthy gave them—but not the outcome. “[Roy] likes the access but is still unhappy with the products,” a Republican lobbyist told me. And the definitionally conservative offers being floated from the speaker’s office to the Freedom Caucus hardliners have not landed the way they’ve hoped.

Process reform, for instance—the rules-based mechanisms that allow more rank-and-file member input on bills once they hit the floor—has been a longtime conservative fever dream that Johnson was genuinely passionate about, even prior to his speakership. According to several of my sources, Johnson had floated the idea of committing significant political capital to this endeavor, and if the Freedom Caucus believed they lived in a less-apocalyptic time, they probably would have gone for it.

But, with the apocalypse nigh and all that, it was rejected out of hand. First, as the MAGA aide pointed out to me, the caucus had already made significant headway on process reform during negotiations with McCarthy last year, ending in a much-ballyhooed power-sharing agreement (though McCarthy did end up bypassing it when it suited his needs). And second, as the MAGA-aligned aide reminded me, back in November, Johnson had used expedited procedures to get a short-term C.R. to the floor, over conservative opposition and without their input. “[Johnson’s] going to be like, process process process, but then, didn’t he put a bill on suspension on the floor to bankroll billions and billions and billions of dollars?” he argued. “Like, it’s hard to preach about process [reform] right now, when you didn’t do that to get us to where we’re at now. Dude, we’re so far past procedure.”

Perhaps most importantly, the proposed deal is receiving pushback from both the Brooks Brothers think tank Republican activist world and the arsonists in the MAGA-verse. The Heritage Foundation, the longtime arbiter of what is and is not considered sufficiently conservative, reamed the new proposed budget, as did the Center for Renewing America, the Russ Vought-run hardline group that served as headquarters for the 19 McCarthy hostage-takers last year. Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, too, has been tearing apart the bill on social media and on his podcasts, telling his followers that it was the same bill “conservatives were so disappointed in last summer that they fired Kevin McCarthy.”

As go the talking heads, so too goes the base; as goes the base, so too go the ideologues. Johnson can, of course, tout his own credentials, and has done so extensively, even while his own hardliners hard-line him. “I’m also a conservative hardliner; that’s been my entire career in Congress,” he told reporters Wednesday afternoon, shortly after the failed rules vote. But alas, being a 2018 conservative—especially one now burdened with power—may not be enough for today’s MAGA-headed members.