Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Dylan Byers. Tonight, a close look at how Fox News is leveraging Brett Baier’s unexpectedly Swan-like Trump interview to bolster the network’s remnant credibility in the post-Dominion, post-Tucker era. Tina Nguyen will be back tomorrow with another update from inside the House G.O.P. panic room.

But first…

By Abby Livingston

• The Boebert-M.T.G. Holy War: The high school cafeteria metaphor for Congress may prove more apt than we initially realized. Earlier today, after all, Sam Brodey and Zachary Petrizzo of The Daily Beast reported that multiple eyewitnesses on the House floor saw a once-unimaginable spat between MAGA darlings Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert regarding who deserved proper credit for an embryonic impeachment movement against Biden. “I’ve donated to you, I’ve defended you. But you’ve been nothing but a little bitch to me,” Greene apparently said, charmingly. “And you copied my articles of impeachment after I asked you to cosponsor them.” Boebert reportedly replied: “OK, Marjorie, we’re through.” A stunned Republican lawmaker told the Beast, “I heard Marjorie call Boebert a bitch right to her face.”

  For context, Boebert caused a ruckus on Tuesday when she introduced a resolution to impeach Biden for abuse of power and dereliction of duty for allegedly not enforcing the border. In May, Greene introduced articles of impeachment against Biden and two members of his Cabinet, Merrick Garland and Alejandro Mayorkas. Obviously, most sound-minded Republicans seem reluctant to support any of this, but that’s no longer the point in this bizarro world.

  Much like Nancy Pelosi in the early Trump years, Kevin McCarthy has discouraged his members from backing the impeachment movement ahead of committee investigations, per reports from the House G.O.P. conference meeting earlier in the morning. McCarthy needs a headache of this variety as much as he needs a third eyeball, but presumably he’s at least relieved that his caucus is coming for another politician, at least for now.

• The Schiff Censure, Pt. III: Anna Paulina Luna and House Republicans successfully cleared a procedural hurdle via a 218-208 vote to move forward in their effort to censure Adam Schiff, Pelosi’s Democratic pointman during most of the House investigations into Trump, and now a hopeful for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat. A previous stab failed last week, mainly because Luna got too cute. She tried to fine Schiff $16 million—her office’s estimate for half the cost of the Mueller investigation—which caused even a sizable bloc of Republicans to balk. (Opening the door to fines like that could effectively bankrupt a fellow member.) Generally speaking, censure is a shame exercise reserved for member malfeasance that falls just short of expulsion. On the scales of modern legislation, it’s worse than calling your colleague a bitch but not as bad as expelling them.

  Democrats lined up on the floor to defend Schiff’s honor. Schiff himself took to the podium for a pre-buttal: “No matter how many false justifications or slanders you level against me, you but indict yourselves. As Liz Cheney said, ‘There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.’”

• Les Miserables: This is the first time that most MAGA House members have served in the majority, and some are gleefully taking full advantage of the different mechanisms available to punish Democrats. But the continued drama on the House side—the prolonged speaker’s vote in January, the debt ceiling drama, the impeachments and censures, canceled votes, etcetera—is beginning to wear on an increasingly worried G.O.P. policy establishment. Consultants and lobbyists are nervously watching, day after day, as performance votes and canceled votes eat up the legislative calendar. Republicans, after all, have only a tiny majority, and there is growing concern that the current Republican priorities are doing more to divide their own conference rather than keep the heat on Democrats.

  Nancy Pelosi seemed to pick up on the tensions Wednesday as she mocked Republicans for looking “miserable” as they went through the motions of yet another censure vote. Afterward, I asked one G.O.P. public affairs strategist if Republicans are having fun and received a one-word answer: “No.”

It was a pleasant reversal of fortune for Baier. Months earlier, after all, he had absorbed a reputational hit after the Glasser-Baker power couple revealed that he’d lobbied his network to rescind its pivotal Arizona-for-Biden call in 2020. Now, with a single interview, he seemed to be thrust back into Fourth Estate stardom, a veritable It Boy of journalism. At the very least, he was off the hook. “Hot for Bret Baier,” tweeted Brooke Hammerling, the veteran member of the tech-and-media P.R. in-crowd. “Never thought I’d say those words but wow. A masterclass in how to do an interview.”

Baier’s ability to stick it out through those years is a testament, in part, to the strength of his well-rated 6 p.m. product, which commands the respect of his D.C. friends and establishment conservative golfing buddies, while only rarely upsetting the MAGA base. It may also be a testament to his deft management of Fox’s internal politics and his own career growth. (Baier was courted at least once by CNN during the Zucker years, and John Malone openly declared him the ideal candidate for his vision of that network.)

In any event, Baier focused solely on his Special Report, where he wields full editorial control, and almost never made too big a stink about whatever batshit crazy conspiracy theory Tucker was peddling in primetime (there were some exceptions). For his troubles, he was rewarded with an annual salary of around $12 million a year, which will come up for renegotiation at some point next year. And in an era when Fox is more insecure than ever about its reach, and when the aforementioned batshit antics are costlier than ever, Baier looks like he’s in for a tidy little raise.

Heading into 2024, Fox News is likely to try and toe a more familiar tightrope, one in which Baier and other conservative-approved journalistic personalities—MacCallum, John Roberts, Dana Perino, etcetera—keep Fox News in the good graces of the center-right while Hannity and the other hippy-punching opinionators—Laura Ingrahm, Jesse Watters, Greg Gutfeld—try to massage the MAGA erogenous zones without inviting unwanted litigation. (Though, to be sure, they can stake their claim on the 2024 news cycle, too, as Hannity’s interview with Gavin Newsom showed.)

The risk, of course, is that every win Baier & Co. notch with the pro-journalism, anti-Trump types will turn off an already wary base that has come to see Fox, as Trump himself put it, as “a hostile network.” Certainly, Tucker and his fellow Fox expats believe that interviews like Baier’s will only further alienate a dwindling audience of Fox viewers who hate official Washington. For the time being, Fox’s calculation seems to be that they can sustain losses on the fringe, and that the Bret haters are probably still tuning in for Hannity and The Five anyway.

So while cable news may be getting smaller, it won’t go away, and the upper-mid-tier stars, like Baier, may be the ones who will best age into this new reality. And, when it comes to democracy, that might not be such a bad thing.