The upshot: If Boehner leaves his house wearing the red baseball cap, there will be no deal.

Right now, Washington is counting down the hours to what looks like an almost-inevitable shutdown—unless Republicans and the White House manage to strike a midnight deal. That’s not unheard of; most of the now-familiar budget crises over the past few years were avoided at the last minute.

But in a series of tweets this morning from a Capitol Hill diner where he was having breakfast, National Review’s crack political reporter, Robert Costa, delivered some vital intelligence that, if you subscribe to the Nichols Red Hat Theory, guarantees we are headed for a shutdown. Here’s what Costa reported…