Good evening, welcome back to The Best and The Brightest. Tina Nguyen here today with some updates on Congress’s neverending production of The Crucible, Biden impeachment edition.

Before we drop into it, a glowing endorsement of Tara’s new podcast with The Ringer, Somebody’s Gotta Win. I love listening to her no-bullshit observations about American politics whenever we hang out—they’re smart, juicy and insidery, from a friend who’s the exact opposite of a fawning insider—and I hope you guys have as much fun listening to her as I do.

• McConnell’s Respite: After a quick few days back from recess, senators are on their way home again. The abbreviated week was surely a blessing for Mitch McConnell, who took center stage in Washington after a second “freezing” episode in front of cameras. Now media attention will flip to the House, which returns on Tuesday, bringing new waves of intra-party drama over impeachment, Ukraine war funding, the shutdown deadline, etcetera. Looming action over several must-pass bills will undoubtedly thin the reporter scrums that have been trailing McConnell around the Capitol.

  But it may be a short-lived reprieve. McConnell’s performance both behind closed doors (as chief negotiator) and in front of the cameras (as his party’s spokesman) will be under relentless scrutiny as Congress marches toward a shutdown on September 30. Should any new episodes occur, there is sure to be a record scratch on Capitol Hill, regardless of what else is going on.

• Mission Accomplished: It’s not uncommon on the Hill for staffers to dream about becoming members of Congress, themselves. Anecdotally, these bids are often overthought and cringey. (The bowels of the Rayburn building aren’t exactly overflowing with charisma.) But a staffer win is exactly what happened this week in Utah, where Republican Celeste Maloy, who has served as counsel to retiring congressman Chris Stewart, just won his seat in a special election.

  Maloy seemingly came out of nowhere to defeat two well-known Utah Republicans, Becky Edwards and Bruce Hough, in the conservative district’s G.O.P. primary. Both candidates self-funded their campaigns well into the six-digits, and Edwards actually more than doubled Maloy’s approximately $300,000 haul over the course of the election. Edwards also hired big-gun consulting firm BrabenderCox to guide her campaign, while Hough had the financial backing of Henry Barbour and Josh and Matt Romney.

  But Maloy tapped into a wide base of support among House Republicans, including Reps. Mark Amodei, Mario Diaz-Bilart, Diana Harshbarger, Dan Newhouse, August Pfluger and Pete Stauber, and former Rep. Jerry Costello. She also picked up support from Julie Conway, a key powerbroker in House G.O.P. political campaigns whose VIEW PAC helps Republican women in primaries.

  Ordinarily, in safe open-seat races like this, members are careful about taking sides: Donate to the winner, and you’ve got a new ally; pick the wrong horse and you’ve made an enemy. But my sense is, Maloy is well-regarded from her time as a staffer and there’s a bit of Washington swagger surrounding this win. “Everyone said she wasn’t going to win… Wrong!” texted one of her K-Street backers.

And now for my report on the latest skirmish enveloping poor Kevin McCarthy…

A few weeks ago, the Freedom Caucus released a list of grievances to be addressed in exchange for their support: the border crisis, the “weaponization” of government, “woke” policies in the military, etcetera. But momentum has coalesced around one demand, in particular: an impeachment, of somebody in the Biden administration, or perhaps even of the president himself.

These demands were articulated most potently by Marjorie Taylor Greene, who told constituents last week that she would vote against a continuing resolution unless the caucus voted to stop funding Ukraine, eliminate Covid vaccine mandates, defund investigations into Trump and his allies, and begin the impeachment process. Caving on any one of those issues, particularly the impeachment topic—no matter how nakedly contrived or batshit crazy—could create a long term headache for McCarthy with Republicans in swing districts. He’s barely holding onto the majority by a thread; if he forces those 18 lawmakers in Biden districts to take too many uncomfortable votes, he could lose the House next year.

So far, McCarthy has tried to thread the needle by threatening an impeachment inquiry into Biden, kicking off a legal process that would allow a committee to compel the administration to turn over documents. During a Fox interview last week, he noted an obvious incentive for MAGA Republicans to vote for a spending bill: “If we shut down, all the government shuts it down, investigation and everything else. It hurts the American public.”

But in the short term, McCarthy faces an equally migraine-inducing dilemma from the likes of M.T.G. and Matt Gaetz, who’ve threatened to kick rocks in the gears if an inquiry doesn’t materialize. Gaetz, in particular, has promised to lower the boom on McCarthy if he doesn’t get his way by forcing the infamous “motion to vacate,” which would call for a snap vote on whether McCarthy should remain as speaker—a power that McCarthy conceded back in January during the speakership vote-a-rama. “[I]f Speaker McCarthy stands in our way, he may not have the job long,” he told a conservative talk radio host on Monday.

A terrifying-sounding threat? Sure. A meaningful one? Maybe not. Yes, it would be easy for Gaetz to initiate the process of snatching the gavel from McCarthy. But the problem, as the Republican source put it, is preventing McCarthy from grabbing it right back. John Boehner’s resignation as Speaker in 2015 was prompted not just by a “motion to vacate” vote, but by the fact that there was a viable, vote-getting challenger waiting in the wings: Paul Ryan, who would eventually become Speaker himself. McCarthy has no such threat to his supremacy, unless Gaetz and four colleagues want to throw in with the Democrats. “If the inquiry is not enough, and they motion to vacate Kevin, then he’ll say, Ok, go ahead. Then you know what? [Someone’s] gonna renominate McCarthy and we’re gonna do 20 rounds again, just like last time,” the Republican source familiar told me. “That’d be the biggest waste of fucking time you’ve ever seen.”

It must be repeated, obviously, that no concrete evidence has yet surfaced that would support the most popular anti-Biden theory in play: that the former vice president received some kind of financial payout in exchange for leveraging his political clout to oust a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma, the natural gas company where Hunter collected a paycheck. But the longer that Republicans suggest that they’re looking into it—where there’s smoke there’s fire!—the longer the narrative stays alive. In this context, it’s not hard to make the president’s unwavering support of his troubled son appear suspect, if not unseemly.

It’s a paradox for McCarthy: Forcing the impeachment issue may benefit Trump and the populist far right, and hold off the threatened speakership coup, but it also hurts Republicans’ odds of holding the House next year. Not that the likes of Greene and Gaetz care: Like many junior MAGA-aligned members, they care more about helping re-elect Trump than who gets to hold the gavel. Culture war, not legislating, is a higher priority.

Of course, even if an impeachment vote reaches the House floor, and even if Republicans manage to vote it through, the Democratic controlled Senate will never vote to impeach Joe Biden. But the theater of the impeachment process is the political tool being forged in this negotiation. As the last few cycles of impeachment proceedings proved, it’s the investigation for high crimes and misdemeanors, not the outcome, that influences voter minds, one way or the other. And in this case, the Republicans would be controlling the narrative all the way—McCarthy and future control of Congress be damned.