Hi there, folks. If you’re in Washington, facing the prospect of a government shutdown and waves of furloughs, things probably don’t seem The Best and The Brightest right now. (Or maybe our namesake—David Halberstam’s 1972 book about the policy geniuses who thinkfluenced the nation straight into the Vietnam War—is more fitting than ever.) While we might not be delivering the happiest news to your inbox this evening, we will endeavor to give you a working map of what might be the most scattershot, unfocused government shutdown in recent memory.

But first…

• Boebert, Boebert, Boebert: The only potential winner of the looming government shutdown may be Lauren Boebert, whose tawdry vaping-and-groping scandal, during a live production of Beetlejuice: The Musical, has been somewhat overshadowed by the even more embarrassing drama playing out in Washington. But only somewhat.

  Out of curiosity, I polled three of my favorite MAGA operatives to get a flavor of how grope-gate is going over with the base. None of them thought it would tank her, though it wasn’t exactly going to inspire more loyalty. “I mean, it’s heavy petting and poor behavior in a dark theater, it’s not advocating for transing kids,” said one. Nevertheless, they did express their concern that Boebert’s recent antics—fighting with Marjorie Taylor Greene on the House floor, fudging her reasons for missing votes, a messy divorce breathlessly covered by Page Six —may be putting her at risk of losing her congressional seat and threatening the House majority. “She needs to get serious,” said another. “There’s still time to save her. But this doesn’t help.”

  In 2022, of course, Boebert barely won re-election in her Colorado district, beating her opponent by just 546 votes. Her district, as one operative noted, has only grown more “blue and independent” ever since. In July, the Cook Political Report moved her seat from a “lean Republican” to a “toss-up” rating. She’d be more likely to win re-election by moderating a bit, but her small-dollar donor base—which comprised roughly 45 percent of her fundraising last cycle—wants a purebred MAGA warrior, not a squish.

  For the past several months, Boebert has been working to reinvent herself as a firebrand in Washington but a pragmatist for her district—shaking hands, kissing babies, even sitting for a Politico profile. (The headline: “Lauren Boebert Ditches the MAGA Thing.”) Alas, the Beetlejuice incident, which became public the next day, has clearly set her back. I’m told that her team has tripled down on planned appearances in her district, and if McCarthy allows G.O.P members to leave Washington next weekend (unlikely), she will probably attend the Texas Youth Summit to deliver a speech of contrition to a crowd of young Christian activists. At the moment, she’s not on the schedule, said a source, “but if she comes, she’s going to own it and apologize and pledge to get her shit together.”

But generally, everyone who has a basic knowledge of the House is adjusting their behavior in preparation for a shutdown in a slew of ways:

• Everyone’s working for the weekend: Members are scrapping plans for the weekly trek back to the home district as congressional leaders are advising them to stay around during the weekend for potential votes. Sometimes, forcing members to stay in can be the pressure point needed to prod them toward constructive negotiations. But there is little optimism that much of anything will work this time.
• Essential staff: Chiefs of staff are deliberating over which of their subordinates are deemed essential—i.e., required to come to work while everyone else stays home—but it remains unclear whether the House G.O.P. leadership will give broad guidance on that question, or if individual chiefs will make the call.
• Now or never?: Agency officials tasked with Capitol Hill diplomacy are hustling around like white rabbits, trying to pack in as many meetings as possible with members and staffers before the would-be shutdown. The fear here? The executive branch officials worry they themselves will be furloughed on Oct. 1.
• Money stuff: There continues to be a debate about the propriety of campaign fundraising during a shutdown. The consensus appears to be moving toward canceling these events, as happened in 2013. “Smart fundraisers will pause,” a G.O.P. lobbyist told me. This is no small thing. The fallout from canceled fundraisers in 2013 lasted far longer than the polling fallout back then. Days after the government reopened, the Obamacare website failure erased much of the shutdown damage Republicans inflicted upon themselves. But House Republicans were concerned enough about their fundraising numbers that they actively set lower bars when campaign finance reports were filed that next January.

  Nevertheless, on Wednesday, there were some fundraisers who said it will be hard to walk away from deposits made to secure venues. So far, none of the half-dozen or so operatives I spoke with said they had heard of cancellations… yet. “Everybody is keeping things on the schedule until it’s not,” a Democratic former chief of staff told me. But, he added, fundraisers are easy to cancel. The truly difficult potential cancellations ahead could be October CODELs, which involve international travel, diplomacy and foreign governments. “Canceling those is a larger problem,” the former chief told me.

• Thinking ahead: Last week, I reported that some vulnerable Republican members were going into the field to poll ahead of a shutdown to get a reading of the “normal”—or pre-shutdown—political environment. A Democratic pollster told me that House campaigns on the left are very much in a holding pattern as operatives watch the shutdown. In normal election cycles, this person told me, endangered House Democratic incumbents tend to poll their districts in the fourth quarter of the off-year. Now, this person said, it would be a waste of money to conduct surveys until the shutdown is over and until it’s clear how much political damage has been inflicted and which party is feeling it.

Compromise is a lost art, and a dirty word, in Washington these days. But it’s especially impossible when large portions of the Republican base are averse to negotiating on their demands at all. “A lot of the members, as far as their constituents, they’re hearing overwhelmingly, shut it down,” a Republican close to House G.O.P. leadership and the Freedom Caucus negotiators told me. “Hold your ground,” the insider said, paraphrasing members’ constituent feedback. “Inflation and spending is too high. [Woke] policies, whether it’s D.O.J. or in the military, are just wrong.”

McCarthy, it appears, may have underestimated the dedication of the holdout faction—a loose, informal confederation of Freedom Caucus members, MAGA warriors, and pissed-off rank-and-filers—which even its most powerful members can’t control. Moreover, it appears that Republicans in general have misunderstood the diversity of their demands, which vary in their particulars from member to member, to the point that it can’t even be classified as a traditional Freedom Caucus-versus-establishment fight, or even a hardliner-versus-moderate fight. At best, it could be described as MAGA warriors versus realists, but even that would be too broad. “You’re dealing with lots of caucuses of one,” the Republican insider added. “It’s not like you’re negotiating with the Freedom Caucus. It’s individuals, one at a time… each kind of negotiating in a very freelance capacity. That takes time, and the goalposts keep moving.”

Sure, it reads more like a Newsmax programming lineup than a workable list of legislative demands. (While they’re at it, why not ask for a pony, too?) After all, even if McCarthy can pass a bill out of the House, with his razor-thin margin, the legislation would still have to be approved by the Senate (never gonna happen) and signed by Biden (nope). The only possible way forward is for McCarthy to find a compromise—that dreaded word again—that can satisfy enough Democrats, too.

Nevertheless, McCarthy must navigate the labyrinth of demands from the 18-plus holdouts, each of whom have different and constantly evolving red lines. Per my sources, roughly half of the Republican holdouts are opposed to a watered-down, half-measures version on principle, and will be exceedingly difficult to move: Among them, Matt Gaetz, Cory Mills, Eli Crane, Dan Bishop, Marjorie Taylor Grene, Lauren Boebert, Cory Mills, and Anna Paulina Luna.

Some opponents have voiced more specific, individual objections, which could provide McCarthy some latitude to tend to their concerns. Tony Gonzales, for instance, is neither MAGA nor a Freedom Caucus member, but represents a Texas border district and wants to see the migrant crisis better addressed. Victoria Spartz wants McCarthy to commit to a debt commission. Ralph Norman thinks McCarthy could cut another $410 million from defense spending that goes to border security for other countries, like Egypt and Jordan.

Other objectors who might otherwise be open to negotiations—heck, even the prospect of compromise—face pressure to not cave from voters back home. Some are mulling runs for state office, and need to bolster their “fighter” reputation. In the end, these holdouts might be the easiest for McCarthy to pick off, if he can offer them some symbolic victory. But winning over enough of them by addressing each of their individual asks, then crafting a bill that would still pass through the Senate and get signed by Biden, requires a delicate touch: give one member too much, and it risks alienating another member. “It’s like a Rubik’s cube missing a bunch of colors,” said an advisor to a senior Republican congressman who’s supporting the C.R.

The ironic thing, the advisor added, was that the holdouts’ proposals were not “radical or crazy” by traditional conservative standards: they were simply not feasible in a divided government, to say nothing of a House where McCarthy’s majority hangs by a thread and no wiggle room for anyone to safely vote their principles. “I’m not hearing that it’s, we’re not getting our way and therefore we’re shutting down the government,” he said. “We’re trying to promote conservative governance. But it’s hard because we don’t have a big majority and we’re forced to go it alone. We don't have the ability, like Nancy Pelosi did, to tell the Democrats that if anyone doesn’t join, they’re finished.”

Option one is the most pragmatic but the least purist: McCarthy pivots to solicit the support of House Democrats, haranguing a dozen or so to support the bill. That’s easier said than done, considering that Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries isn’t going to bail him out. But there are enough members who represent districts that voted for Trump, as well as districts now feeling the crush of the migrant crisis entering their states, who might be persuaded to come onboard—so long as Jeffries releases them to vote their districts.

“Look, they’re helping steer this towards a shutdown,” the advisor to a senior Republican member said, referring to a line from the movie Jaws: “Why are we being dragged out to sea? Why don't we drag [the shark] back closer to shore? That's the way I look at this…my view is, we're getting further out to sea, where we should be dragging the Democrats closer to land and putting this on them, too.”

Option two is to win the approval and support of a diehard conservative, who would then serve as an emissary to get the rest onboard, satisfy the MAGA crowd, provide air cover to the ones beholden to their base, and prevent any further red-on-red violence. Matt Gaetz was floated to me as a candidate for this emissary posting—yes, the notorious McCarthy hater who’s started circulating petitions in Capitol bathrooms to vote him out of the speakership. But if the short-term goal is to keep the government funded and prevent furloughs, Gaetz may have to be his target: no one can doubt his right-wing credentials, his reputation for adhering to MAGA principles, and his deft skills at working right-wing media, the ultimate arbiter of conservative vibes. Offering him, or someone with a similar profile, significant leeway on one of these policy items would go a long way towards wooing back the rest.

And option three: Keep grinding away with the current framework developed by the Freedom Caucus and the Main Street Caucus, continue to hammer its virtues to the ideological holdouts, and work with their feedback. While it doesn’t give them everything on their wish list, it gives them some things: denying Biden’s request for aid to Ukraine, cutting government spending by 8 percent, and rebooting the “Secure the Border Act,” which, among other things, allocates money towards a border wall and hiring more border patrol agents. It would still get rejected by the Senate, but at least it might provide McCarthy with more leverage on the next round of negotiations.

“There's a feeling, at least amongst leadership, amongst some of the Freedom Caucus folks, and the Main Street folks, that they could maybe work on that and use that as a template to some more changes,” the Republican insider close to the negotiators noted. But as it stands, he added, the current iteration of the deal is “barely on life support”—unless by some miracle they can get individual members, one by one, to agree to go with it. (And that’s without alienating the moderate Republicans.) Given how dug in every member is into their own individual trenches, and willing to change their demands at any given moment, he described it as a dim hope: “With such a razor thin margin, it’s touch and go.”