However, Democrats are never going to accede to the demands from the hard right of the Republicans for savage spending cuts and the end of funding for “woke programs” such as President Biden’s spending related to climate change, Planned Parenthood, or the flagging of veterans deemed mentally incompetent when they apply for a gun licence. That’s why the US lurches from near-crisis to near-crisis.

The politics of government funding have been made even more complicated by Donald Trump’s campaign to regain the presidency.

He seems to believe it is in his interests for Congress to deny Joe Biden even the semblance of a win. He wants dysfunction and inaction, and the hard right within the Republican caucus in the House appears willing to do his bidding.

A recent bipartisan bill in the Senate, which would have provided funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan and which was tied to funding for US border security and measures that in any other circumstances Biden and the Democrats would never have agreed to, didn’t even reach the floor of the House because of conservatives’ opposition.

It’s in Trump’s political interests, of course, for there to be no progress in stemming the tide of immigrants at the US southern border.

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While the deferrals reflect the difficulty of any level of consensus within the Republicans in the House, they also relate to the precariousness of the position Johnson is in.

He’s chosen to defer rather than resolve the funding arrangements to avoid a confrontation with the hardliners and the risk of meeting the same fate as his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, who lost his prestigious role after a deal with Biden that averted an even more serious shutdown over the peculiar ceiling the US has on its levels of federal government debt.

Under that deal, which has come into focus because of the latest wrangling over the funding bills, the ceiling was suspended for two years after Biden agreed to freeze non-defence discretionary spending this financial year and increase total spending by only 1 per cent next year.

There are some Republicans who wanted Johnson to refuse to agree to even a temporary fix without major concessions, while others were arguing for an extension of current funding levels until September 30, which, under the deal agreed by Biden and McCarthy, would effectively cut non-defence discretionary spending by up to 10 per cent.

Under Congress’s complex rules, more short-term deals beyond April 30 would trigger whole-of-government spending cuts, including for defence and veterans. The traditional conservatives want to avoid that.

If Johnson wants to push the deadline back again, even if only for a week, he’ll probably need the support of the House Democrats or at least most of them. With retirements and the eviction of controversial Republican George Santos, whose seat has been taken by a Democrat, the Republican majority in the House has shrunk to two seats.

There’ll certainly be more than two conservative-MAGA members who would vote against any deal that doesn’t have, for Democrats, unpalatable strings attached.

So, the likelihood is that Congress will buy a few days before Johnson has to again grapple with the impossibility of matching the expectation of the rambunctious conservative minority in the House who toppled McCarthy – and could do the same to him – with a deal acceptable to Democrats and the White House.

The routine funding of the government (which has proven to be less than routine) is separate from the funding for Ukraine that the White House and a largely bipartisan Senate are pleading with Johnson to put before the House.

In Tuesday’s meeting at the White House to discuss the broader funding impasse, discussion of funding Ukraine was, according to Chuck Schumer, the Democrat Senate majority leader, one of the most intense meetings he’d ever experienced. All those present, including Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, urged Johnson to support new US aid.

Johnson has said he is supportive of Ukraine (he wasn’t always) but that border security is his priority – despite refusing to table the Senate bill that included funding for both. Trump, who has a peculiar affinity with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been publicly and successfully urging Republicans to oppose any further aid to Ukraine.

The unwillingness or inability of House Republicans to do something as fundamental as providing funding certainty for a budget for government spending that was agreed by Congress last year doesn’t augur well for the prospects of the budget for 2024-25, which Biden will soon present for discussion and negotiation.

Using the threat of shutting down the government every couple of months or weeks is no way to run a country. The near-farcical routine confrontations of the debt ceiling and appropriation bills ought to embarrass those in Congress.

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They undermine America’s brand globally and cost it financially, with the evidence they provide of political dysfunction leading to credit rating downgrades and higher funding costs on government debt that is spiralling towards threatening levels.

That’s an issue that won’t be resolved unless the more mainstream core of America’s political leadership is prepared to sideline its extremes and address it in a bipartisan manner. But that is unlikely as long as Trump and the conservatives and the MAGA cult in the House have a disproportionate voice in its affairs.