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

In Japanese history, the two centuries between 1468 and 1638 are known as the “Warring States Period.” Although the country was technically ruled by a distant god-emperor, in practice, Japan was fragmented into dozens of small regional clans engaged in constant combat, and every attempt to empower a centralized leader, or shogun, resulted in even more bloody civil war.

If this sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because House Republicans have been through their own political civil war for much of the past year. (Thank goodness they don’t have swords.) And the new Republican shogun, Speaker Mike Johnson, is not doing so hot right now…

More on the end of Johnson’s honeymoon period, below the fold. But first…

• Tucker in the 2024 Octagon?: First, there was Donald Trump suggesting that Fox News host-turned-Twitter content creator (and for the sake of disclosure, my former boss) Tucker Carlson would be a good vice presidential candidate. Then, Carlson appeared with Trump on Saturday Night at a UFC event, sparking wild applause from the audience. There has also been serious lobbying from Trump allies, both behind the scenes and in public, to bring Carlson onboard as a running mate, possibly to circumvent the threat that the antivax, conspiracy-driven Robert F. Kennedy Jr. poses to Trump’s rightward flank.

  Carlson is not uninterested, I’ve heard—traveling around the country to give speeches appeals to him, apparently, and one can’t help but imagine how he’d relish a debate with Kamala Harris. But he would have to assume the office of the vice presidency should Trump win, and that’s where the Trump-Carlson fantasy ticket ends. “He doesn’t want that,” one insider told me. “But he’d like 70 percent of the job.” (Carlson didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

• It’s not over: Congress’s pile of problems will still be waiting after Thanksgiving. On that front, Democrats were delighted by Texas Republican Chip Roy’s on-the-way-out-the-door floor speech: “One thing—I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing.” he said. “One. That I can go campaign on and say we did. Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done.”
• From the Santosverse: One of those problems, of course, is George Santos. The House Ethics Committee finally appears ready to release its report on the troubled, fabulist freshman congressman. These reports are often enlightening packets stacked with documented evidence, and this one, in particular, is one of the most eagerly anticipated, especially among many of Santos’s New York Republican colleagues who are determined to oust him from Congress.

  Ethics Chair Michael Guest said the committee will not issue a recommendation for punishment, but made clear this is because the investigative arm wants to get the report out as quickly as possible, rather than await a committee interpretation of Santos’s guilt or innocence. The report could drop as soon as Thursday, per multiple outlets, and will likely be addressed in December.

• Retirement timing: Members have been crossing the political rainbow bridge en masse in recent weeks. If this is merely the first phase of a bigger trend, it’s likely more retirements will drop when members return later this month. Members frequently make big decisions when they are with their families over national holidays, and they’re headed into this holiday break in a particularly sour mood.

  The Alabama and Arkansas filing deadlines have already lapsed. But it’s worth watching the following delegations, as their states’ filing deadlines come over the course of December: Illinois, California (McCarthy!), Texas, North Carolina, and Ohio.

So much for Johnson’s “honeymoon” period, which lasted all of two weeks. On Wednesday, a coalition of 19 Republican members—including hardliners Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Dan Bishop, and Chip Roy—ganged up to tank a simple vote that would have started debate on a relatively anodyne appropriations bill. This was, I’m told, essentially a protest vote against Johnson for forcing through a clean C.R. that advanced no conservative agenda items, that won the endorsements of Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer; that was, as TPUSA’s Charlie Kirk put it, “unacceptable.” Steve Bannon reposted Kirk’s tweet on Truth Social, adding: “Worse Than Unacceptable…Abject Surrender Without Any Coherent Plan.”

More ominously, the protest vote was clearly a shot across the bow: Two days earlier, Gaetz warned on CNN that Johnson could face a “similar fate” as his predecessor if Johnson doesn’t manage to break up the budget into “single-subject” spending bills. But that’s the direction that Johnson is now taking his caucus, even if it’s through a confusing, “gimmicky” strategy to appease Capitol Hill’s multiple warring factions. Alas, Johnson has only bought himself so much time before the bill comes due at the end of January, and the real five-way fight between him, G.O.P. hardliners, the rest of the House, the Senate, and the White House will get underway.

In theory, this approach gives Johnson time to win members’ trust, dial down the drama, and demonstrate to frustrated voters that Republicans are, in fact, capable of governing. But the pushback that Johnson is already receiving from the Freedom Caucus crowd—on Tuesday, 93 Republicans voted against the C.R., and on Wednesday, Gaetz et al. tanked the Commerce-Justice-Science rules bill—is a flashing red warning sign that Johnson’s lawyerly, serious, pragmatic solution is not the MAGA solution. The hardliners, after all, would rather shut down the government than support a Dem-endorsed spending bill. “I think the pragmatism piece has to be camouflaged,” a Republican lobbyist close to the protest bloc told me. “You can’t be doing it just because you want to govern, at least for the MAGA crowd.”

Ironically, members of the Freedom Caucus, as well as those from more conservative-leaning districts, had initially been interested in the “laddered C.R.” idea from a philosophical standpoint. After all, small-government Republicans, often suspicious of what Democrats cram into omnibus bills, have long advocated breaking spending bills down into smaller chunks, with one bill dedicated to each of the 12 appropriations subcommittees (Energy, Homeland Security, etcetera). What’s more, they finally had a decent grace period to hammer out the details.

The bigger problem, however, is a Trump-era cultural shift that has snapped the poles that once held up Reagan’s “big tent”—neoconservative war hawks, the religious right, Hayek-reading libertarians and the Chamber of Commerce types. Alas, the shoving and shit-talking on the House floor is just the most visible symptom of the dislocation under the surface, as the growing MAGA confederacy pulls farther away from the party’s remaining institutionalists.

Johnson, who recently endorsed Trump, may have the best chance of anyone at corralling the House G.O.P. conference. But the fact remains that he’s essentially a coalition leader, not a majority leader, managing the competing priorities of multiple mini-blocs, any one of which could vote him back out of power at practically any point. “When the Matt Gaetz Eight decapitated McCarthy,” said a senior G.O.P. staffer, “it automatically erased the 197-year standard, which is: A few members do not impose themselves on the rest of us and take over.”

Of course, now that those floodgates have been opened, it’s hard to imagine a return to the status quo, at least while House Republicans have such a slim majority. “What you’re seeing is a new standard, where a few members say, ‘I’m not gonna hold back. I’m gonna dive in. I’m going to try to change the whole conference’s direction, or stop something, or start something in the conference, because I can,’” the senior staffer continued. “It’s an age of individuality in the ultimate coalition sport.”

And yet, despite hardliners intimating that their honeymoon with Johnson is officially over, and the words “motion to vacate” on Gaetz’s lips, Johnson is probably safe for a few more weeks. As another senior staffer told me, “everyone’s just traumatized” from the last speaker race, and would prefer not to repeat the process anytime soon, especially before the holidays. McCarthy’s recent schoolyard antics might also work in Johnson’s favor: he may not make everyone happy, but at least he’s not Kevin. “When McCarthy elbows people, allegedly,” the lobbyist remarked, “it reminds everybody that this is not McCarthy’s show anymore.”