Happy Wednesday, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tina Nguyen.

In tonight’s edition, a pre-holiday inside look at the House hardliners’ 2024 budget punch list, plus the emerging argument among the MAGA bloc for decoupling U.S. border security from Ukraine (and Taiwan, and Israel, and… probably everything else).

Also: Today is the last day of Puck’s holiday sale, so why not pick up the perfect gift for the unfulfilled news junkie in your life? Also also: My forthcoming book, The MAGA Diaries, is available for preorder. It won’t come out until January 16, but consider it a belated Christmas gift for yourself.

But first, here’s Abby Livingston with the latest on Capitol Hill…

Here’s the topline takeaways from today’s committee announcements, and the Senate committee’s raw, already filed reports with the F.E.C.:

• Republicans’ Good Month: Both the N.R.S.C. and the N.R.C.C. outraised Democrats, even as the Democratic committees held their cash-on-hand advantages. This is particularly good news for the new speaker, Mike Johnson. We already knew that the N.R.C.C., which raised $9 million, had a strong November, but today made clear that Republicans outpaced House Democrats, who brought in $7.5 million.

  The question is whether Johnson can keep up this pace over the coming year, or if this was simply an outlier—a side effect of being a new party leader with capacious donor limits that had otherwise been exhausted by ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy earlier in the year.

  Over in the Senate, Republicans raised $6 million to the Democrats’ $5.5 million. But the D.S.C.C. sits on $17 million cash on hand, while the N.R.S.C. posted $7.7 million banked.

• The Johns Pony Up: Senate G.O.P. Whip John Thune was by far the N.R.S.C.’s biggest November donor among members, sending in $250,000, while John Barrasso transferred $50,000. But the third John in the McConnell succession race, Cornyn, contributed $60,000 earlier this year. Of course, all three Johns indirectly bring in millions to the committee and to their in-cycle colleagues and candidates.

  Because the Senate committees filed their reports ahead of the midnight deadline, we can see that four other Republican senators made five-figure donations to the committee in November: John Boozman, Joni Ernst, Cindy Hyde-Smith, and Lindsey Graham. Roger Marshall, through his leadership PAC, also contributed $5,000.

  Among Democrats, D.S.C.C. vice chair Tina Smith kicked in $15,000 by way of her deliciously named “Velvet Hammer” leadership PAC.

  While House committees tend to hound members for money, the Senate side has a different protocol. Instead, senators—many of whom have national followings and donor networks—tend to help each other in less trackable ways, i.e., raising money directly for the committee, forming joint fundraising accounts, sharing their grassroots email networks, and hosting fundraisers for colleagues.

• Rob Portman can’t quit politics: Also intriguing from the N.R.S.C’s report: Former senator Rob Portman can’t seem to quit politics. Although he retired last cycle, he pitched in $20,000 from his old campaign account to the committee.

At the moment, the holdouts are more like a loose confederation than an organized bloc, unlike the 20 members who opposed McCarthy’s speaker bid back in January. (Of course, many of those members overlap.) Indeed, while they broadly agree on policy—the hardliners want to cut Ukraine funding, increase security at the border, and slash overall spending—they are divided over their preferred tactics, according to a Republican lobbyist familiar with the thinking of both groups.

The first camp, consisting of ideological “die-hards” including Josh Brecheen, Chip Roy, Dan Bishop, Michael Cloud, and Eli Crane, are insistent on breaking the federal budget into as many individual spending bills as possible, ostensibly to minimize opportunities for compromise on their conservative agenda. (There’s a second debate over whether to push for the ability to propose more conservative amendments on the floor during the appropriations debate, but that’s a much lower priority than getting a purist bill through the House.)

The second camp, consisting of younger members including Anna Paulina Luna, Byron Donalds, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert, broadly agree with the hardliners’ goals, but, as the Republican lobbyist put it, they are “more susceptible to social media” and will likely take their cues from chronically online MAGA constituents. “It’s a factor in that if you’re Johnson trying to get their vote, it’s good to know if the base will go crazy on social media,” he added.

Worrying over what the internet thinks about your budget might not be as shallow as it sounds. These are members who have built their fan bases and subsequent political power on digital platforms. Luna, for instance, was initially an Instagram influencer before joining the activist group Turning Point USA, in 2018, and she remains deeply enmeshed in that online culture. “She doesn’t make every decision based on social media, but she looks at it as a good gut check of where the people are at,” the MAGA strategist told me. In other words, it’s a way to quickly gauge if the G.O.P. base is likely to accept whatever bill Johnson wants to pass, for instance, or if there’s a new demand the hardliners should be making instead.

Overall, however, these members are most concerned with maintaining ideological consistency in the upcoming budget fight, and in the case of the younger group, are perhaps willing to bend the norms of the institution in order to do so. (As one MAGA ally spun it to me, this cohort is happy to explore “new ways of doing things.”) After all, the reason that members like Gaetz and Crane ousted McCarthy was precisely because he passed a spending bill on the Democrats’ terms—with a dreaded continuing resolution, no less—and shunted their conservative priorities aside.

Of course, a compromise bill that connects those two issues is precisely the strategy being pursued by Republicans in the Senate, who perceive cracks in the Democratic caucus that they believe they can exploit. But increasingly, I hear, the Trumpist wing in the House is demanding a “pure” immigration bill that hardens the border without any supplemental bills or tradeoffs at all. “They want some form of enforcement at the border, a form of the ‘[Remain] in Mexico’ policy, and/or anything that they can sell as a reform of what they see as an abuse of the ‘fear of persecution’ declaration” for asylum seekers, said the Republican lobbyist.

Once again, it seems, the House hardliners are talking themselves onto war footing, ramping up to an ultimatum on legislation that would be dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate. But Johnson may soon have to grapple with the fact that his right flank would rather have nothing than something, if compromise is required.

Senate Republicans, a more temperamentally moderate (and generally hawkish) group, are continuing to push forward in negotiations with the White House. But among Republicans in the lower chamber, there’s an abiding sense that Democrats, and the Biden White House in particular, can’t be trusted on the immigration issue. “Are you just giving D.H.S. a check and saying, ‘Do with it with what you may,’ which we all know is not going to be actual border security? Or are there going to be strict instructions about what the money is going toward?” asked the senior aide to the MAGA representative. “If there’s any indication that this is soft border security, then you’re going to put the House in a position of like, ‘Okay, you can call this border security, but this isn't really border security.’”

The drama is currently on hold while House Republicans are on vacation for the winter holiday, but each of these issues will likely become a major headache for Johnson upon their return. They will also force Johnson to decide whether he cares more about passing critical legislation or simply staying in power. While there are some openings for a savvy negotiator, the speaker has almost no flexibility on his vote margin, especially if the hardliners insist on separating border funding from any supplemental defense bills. And no matter what, he’ll have to deliver something that his far-right members can take home to their districts or brandish on social media. “They’ll be pretty mad if they don’t get anything in return,” the Republican lobbyist close to the holdouts said gravely.

Earlier in his tenure, Johnson survived a couple attempted baby-splitting gambits—a proposed Israel-funding-for-I.R.S.-cuts swap, a stand-alone Ukraine funding vote, the “laddered C.R.,” and so on. Now, with his honeymoon period ending and members’ patience running out, he’ll be put to the same purity tests as his predecessor. In their eyes, Johnson’s already eroded their trust by working with Democrats to keep the government open. Alas, the trouble with answering to an increasingly zealous base is that the base holds their members to impossible standards. “They would look dishonest in their efforts to oust McCarthy if they just go and vote for whatever Mike Johnson puts out,” the MAGA strategist warned. “And so, some of those folks are in tough positions like that.”