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On Wednesday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson pushed ahead with his doomed attempt to avert a government shutdown, despite clear signs that the bill did not appeal to conservatives in his own party or the Democrats who control the upper house of Congress.

The House was scheduled to vote early Wednesday evening on a government-stay-in-place resolution peppered with concessions to the conservative right, including spending cuts and a bill attached to the broader package aimed at barring noncitizens from voting in federal elections – something that is already illegal.

“This is the piece we are playing,” said the spokesman The Hill this week. “I’m going to work around the clock to get it done.”

But his party went into the vote with the certainty that the bill in this form would neither pass the Democratic-controlled Senate nor be signed into law by President Joe Biden. Biden had said in a statement that he would veto the bill if it landed on his desk.

Johnson therefore has to deal with almost universal opposition from his Democratic rivals as well as defectors from his own party. One exception is Jared Golden from Maine, who has declared that he will vote for the bill.

The government is expected to begin a partial shutdown of the services in October if no agreement is reached on a funding bill by then. Democrats are insisting on passing a bill that keeps funding for all agencies at existing levels except the Secret Service, which they say needs a boost after two assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump in as many months. Some conservatives oppose it, citing the agency’s operational failures and claiming that the Secret Service does not deserve expanded funding. Others are unhappy that the bill does not also increase funding for the Pentagon.

In the Senate, MPs are still working on a transitional bill to keep the government running until mid-December, setting up another battle before the Christmas break. Johnson’s bill, on the other hand, would fund the government for six months at the reduced level he chose.

“Congress has an immediate obligation to do two things: responsibly fund the federal government and ensure the security of our elections,” Johnson said in a statement the day before the vote. “Because we owe this to our voters, we will move forward on Wednesday with a vote on the six-month CR with the SAVE Act attached. I urge all of my colleagues to do what the overwhelming majority of the people of this country rightly demand and deserve — stop non-Americans from voting in American elections.”

But he has failed to win over his party’s most vocal members in the House, making Wednesday’s vote an all the more confusing strategy – and one that could end up handing more power to Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the Democratic caucus. Johnson has relied in the past on Jeffries and his caucus to provide votes for government-maintaining measures against opposition from his own party. That’s the path former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy also took before he was ousted by a conservative rebellion in the fall of 2023.

Johnson has so far escaped that fate, in part because lawmakers dare not throw the House back into the weeks of inaction and chaos that McCarthy’s ouster sparked last year. The Republican caucus’ inability to agree on a successor paralyzed the chamber for weeks.

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the Republicans who opposed Johnson’s latest attempt to cut a government funding deal, tried to bring about a second impeachment of the speaker earlier this year to remove Johnson from office, but the attempt failed after Democrats defended Johnson.

“Johnson will NOT commit to facing the Democrats in a fight against a shutdown and will allow the passage of a clean CR to fund the government because he believes a government shutdown will be blamed on Republicans and will hurt their elections,” Greene said Tuesday. “Johnson is fighting a fake fight he doesn’t really want to fight.”