Out of leverage in government shutdown negotiations, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is preparing to ram federal funding legislation through the House on Wednesday with Democratic help as his brittle GOP majority again rejects a measure to keep the government open.

Funding for federal agencies expires Monday, and a shutdown would ensue the next day without new legislation. The House is set to vote on a three-month funding extension, called a continuing resolution or CR, plus more than $230 million for the Secret Service to beef up protection for former president Donald Trump and other candidates on the campaign trail. The bill is a bipartisan agreement that has sufficient support to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate and prevent a shutdown.

But the legislation is Plan B for Johnson. The speaker last week pushed a six-month CR and attached an unrelated measure to require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. A small group of Republicans joined most Democrats to block that approach in the House, leaving Johnson a choice between forcing a shutdown over the voter registration requirements — as Trump has demanded — or cutting a deal with Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Johnson took the deal, calling a shutdown just before November’s elections “political malpractice.”

“We came a little short of the goal line, so we have to go with the last available play,” Johnson told reporters Tuesday.

Wednesday’s vote will be the seventh time in the past year that the House GOP majority will rely on Democratic support to pass a bill to fund the government.

“This feels like the third or fourth time this Congress that House Republicans have had to learn the same elementary lesson: In a narrowly divided government, partisan bully tactics and appealing to the extreme just does not work, plain and simple,” Schumer said Tuesday on the Senate floor.

The spending debate again exposes fault lines among Republicans that color the debate of nearly every spending bill before Congress. That infighting has stymied pretty much any meaningful progress that conservatives hoped to make while holding the House majority, some lawmakers privately concede.

And it has led resignation to set in among Republicans that a single-digit majority within a conference that has been consumed with personal rivalries, cannibalized its leaders and blocked its own legislative priorities is effectively no majority at all.

“The speaker is going to do what he has to do with the Democrats to pass the CR. That’s kind of where we’re at,” Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) said Monday.

Republicans’ main goal now, Johnson said, is to finish all 12 annual spending bills, or appropriations, that separately fund various parts of the government by the new Dec. 20 funding deadline. But that may not be enough time for House and Senate negotiators, especially with Congress out of session all of October and half of November.

Congress often rolls the appropriations bills into a single, massive package, called an omnibus or omni, to save time ahead of end-of-year deadlines. Congressional leaders in the past have leveraged lawmakers’ Christmas holiday break to compel them to vote for the legislation.

Johnson vowed Tuesday that he would not allow an omnibus to pass the House.

“We have broken the Christmas omni, and I have no intention of going back to that terrible tradition,” he said. “There won’t be a Christmas omnibus.”

That tees up a post-election sprint to finish funding bills by Dec. 20, or for the speaker to call for another CR, likely extending into March — the timeline most House Republicans originally preferred.

“There’s not a good time for a CR, ever. This gives a chance for us to work as many appropriations bills as possible to prevent an omni. It’s always going to be tough when you have a three-, four-, five-vote margin,” Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.) said Tuesday. “Obviously, the better timing would have been into March and that didn’t happen. Now we’re doing a lot of things that are really unknown in the fourth quarter.”