President Joe Biden is in his home state of Delaware on Monday touting “$16.4 billion in new funding from the 2021 infrastructure law for passenger rail projects along the Northeast Corridor.” There’s a good reason for that. Over in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republicans are struggling to pass the Transportation and Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill. It was supposed to come to a vote on Friday, but there was a problem.

About a dozen House Republicans, including several New Yorkers, have concerns with cuts to Amtrak included in the bill, according to two Republican aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Republican dynamics. Some of them have threatened to vote against it if it comes to the floor.

According to the Washington Post, new Speaker Mike Johnson is running into problems already with his funding plans. He wants to pass all the appropriations bills in a prompt manner to strengthen the party’s negotiating hand with the White House and U.S. Senate. But the schedule is slipping, and it looks like he has no path to pass some of the bills, including funding for Commerce, Justice, and Labor, Health and Human Services and Education and the agricultural Farm Bill.

Each bill has its own hurdles, but the similarity is an inability to get near-unanimity within his own conference. He’s even having a problem with a provision to ban using postal delivery of abortion pills. The proposed bills all have a combination of steep cuts and culture war provisions that put off at least some members, particularly those in tight reelection races.

But the larger problem is that Speaker Johnson needs to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government open past November 17. He doesn’t have the votes to do this, however, just as his predecessor Kevin McCarthy didn’t have the votes. He’s trying to appease the holdouts by showing that he can pass the appropriations bills and thereby avoid a last second omnibus deal where the Senate can jam up the House and force them to spend more than they want. It’s not clear that this plan can work, but to have any realistic chance of success he needs to get the appropriations bills passed, and it doesn’t look that is going to happen on schedule.

It’s not a great plan anyway, as Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska points out:

[Bacon] also questioned why Republicans are forcing lawmakers to take tough votes on bills that include steep spending cuts that have no chance of passing the Democratic-controlled Senate or becoming law. Most cuts that House Republicans vote for in the House will be rolled back if House and Senate leaders negotiate a spending deal.

“Why don’t we just do that to begin with?” Bacon said. “That’s what I’ve advised.”

It’s a solid point. The Democrats are relishing all these votes for unpopular cuts (not to mention culture war provisions) they can pin on Republican incumbents. In a different world, they’d be the ones forcing Republicans to take these votes rather than having them self-inflict this political pain on themselves. But Johnson has no room to maneuver. To avoid a government shutdown without relying on Democratic votes, he needs his nearly every member of his caucus to vote for a continuing resolution, and he has to show that he has a plan to force deep cuts further down the line.

But, again, if he can’t pass the deep cuts even for bills that will never become law, how can he demonstrate that his plan will work?

And let’s remember that even if he does pass all the appropriations bills, each of them will have to be reconciled with the Senate version, and then those compromise bills will have to avoid a White House veto. In other words, he’ll need Democratic endorsement of the spending bills at some point, even if he never gets any endorsement from House Democrats.

So, what we’re witnessing is a big demonstration of denial. The House Republicans can’t get unanimity around anything that’s realistic so the strategy is to just pretend that they can get their way eventually by some kind of magic. This delusion is what cost McCarthy his job, and it’s what is forcing Johnson to go through all these hoops. Last Thursday, Johnson even made a loopy proposal to have a “laddered” continuing resolution.

While it’s not totally clear how that would work, Johnson seemed to be referring to different lengths of funding for each of the 12 individual appropriations bills, triggering ongoing shutdown threats for different parts of government. A continuing resolution typically extends current funding levels for all appropriations bills until one later date, buying time for lawmakers to haggle over an updated government funding deal.

This would potentially create a ladder of partial or rolling government shutdowns. I’m pretty sure it’s a non-starter in the Senate and it doesn’t remove the need to compromise with the Democrats.

In the end, there’s no way around the fundamental problem which is that the House Republicans do not have the ability to pass spending bills using only Republican votes, and even if they do accomplish this, they still have to negotiate with the Democrats in the Senate and White House. Since they can’t keep the government operational on their own, they need to face reality and cut deals with House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, but the Speaker isn’t allowed to do this and keep his job.

Speaker Johnson has not found a way around this problem, and so it looks like we will have a government shutdown of indeterminate duration. And eventually there will be some Republicans who are willing to defect and make a deal to get the government open again. This will most likely have to happen through a discharge petition to force a vote on a clean continuing resolution. And that means that Speaker Johnson will have lost control of the House floor on the most important matter, which is how money is spent.