In one month we may face yet another government shutdown crisis, if Congress doesn't act before then to pass some sort of federal budget. And from the vantage point of one month out, the possibility of chaos seems high no matter what eventually happens. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is going to be forced to act one way or another, and it seems every option he has is going to leave some portion of his own party very angry with him.

Congress, of course, is still enjoying their obscenely-long summer break and won't return for another week or two (the Senate returns next week, but the House will enjoy an extra week in the sun and won't be back until mid-September). The budget deadline is the end of the month. So far, the House has passed exactly one of the 12 appropriations bills that make up the federal budget, while the Senate has not passed any of them. The Senate, however, has passed all 12 of the bills through committee with bipartisan votes, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is going to hit the ground running when he returns. With such broad support for the compromise budget bills, they all stand a good chance of passing the full Senate.

But while Schumer recognized the reality of his razor-thin majority margin and got Republican input into his budget bills, over in the House the Republicans are squabbling over how extreme and partisan their budget bills should be. One faction wants them insanely extreme while the other faction only wants them to be moderately extreme (and my apologies for that oxymoron). Democratic input was not sought at all during this process.

Even capitulating to the idea of passing a purely partisan budget hasn't been smooth sailing for McCarthy. It is highly doubtful he'll be able to cobble together the other 11 bills for floor votes before the end of the month. And even if he did, they will all be dead on arrival in the Senate, making McCarthy's entire budget drama nothing more than Kabuki theater designed to please the base.

McCarthy did attempt to hew to one recent conservative bugaboo, by passing all 12 bills through "regular order" -- the way it has always been theoretically supposed to happen. But he only managed to get one of them done before the summer break -- two others McCarthy wanted passed before then had to be yanked due to more intraparty squabbling among his ranks.

The big boogeyman in this regular-order obsession is either a "continuing resolution" or an "omnibus budget bill." Both receive scorn from the radicals in McCarthy's caucus. But we may see both of these before we're done with next year's budget (which is how things usually happen, these days).

First up will be a continuing resolution. This will be necessary to avoid a government showdown, if no budget has passed both houses and been signed by President Joe Biden. A "C.R." (as it is known on the Hill) essentially just kicks the can down the road a little bit. They usually just continue whatever spending levels currently exist for another few weeks or months until an actual budget can be passed -- although they could also tack on things like disaster aid (Florida, Maui, etc.) and military aid to Ukraine.

McCarthy likely won't have the votes to pass a C.R. from his own side of the aisle. There are enough Republicans who shrug at the political consequences of a government shutdown to require at least some Democratic votes to pass any C.R. This is likely to get McCarthy into trouble, but it would indeed be the responsible thing to do. How much trouble McCarthy gets into is always an open question, since any House member can call for a vote to "vacate the chair" at any time. If McCarthy doesn't receive a simple majority of votes from the full House, then we go right back to where we were during the painful process which put him into the speaker's chair -- holding vote after vote after vote, with all other business suspended.

The C.R. will likely punt the deadline to some time in December. Some Republicans want a much shorter timeline, suggesting punting for only two weeks (after which they'd need another C.R. if the budget wasn't complete and on Biden's desk). What will likely happen in December is that all the budget bills will get wrapped up into one giant bill (the omnibus) and pass both houses, likely with bipartisan votes (they could still pass the 12 bills separately, but it has become usual for them to just wrap them all together, to speed up the parliamentary process).

At some point, Kevin McCarthy is going to have to deal with reality instead of feeding the fantasies of his more rabid members. Remember, right now McCarthy is trying to referee factions who are squabbling about how extreme the budget should be. The hotheads want a Republican Fantasyland budget with all sorts of red meat in it for the MAGA base (to wit: Defund Special Counsel Jack Smith's office! Send the 101st Airborne to the southern border! Outlaw all abortions everywhere! Feed Hunter Biden to live alligators!). OK, that is a wee bit exaggerated, I will admit... but not by a whole lot. Every whackadoodle idea from the far right is clamoring to be included in the budget bills. Pushing back are Republicans from swing districts where they fear not being re-elected if they throw their lot in with the MAGA crazies. But no matter who wins these intraparty battles won't matter in the slightest. All the budget bills they agree upon are never going to make it through the Senate, after all. And that is the reality McCarthy will eventually have to face.

Whatever budget passes will have to pass the Senate, period. So the Senate might just pass their budget bills and then refuse to budge on negotiations -- especially if their bills get large bipartisan majorities. Schumer can just hold a press conference afterwards and tell McCarthy: "These bills are bipartisan and if they are brought up in the House, they will pass with a bipartisan majority, so I would urge the speaker to do so. We are not interested in changing our bills at all, since we already had plenty of input from Republicans in crafting them."

Sooner or later, the Senate and the White House are going to have to sit down with McCarthy and work something out, though. What normally happens in such situations is that almost all of the contentious and heavily-partisan nonsense will wind up on the cutting room floor. President Biden will threaten to veto almost everything the extremists have demanded in the House budget bills, and McCarthy will be forced to back down. A few items from the House budget will likely make the final cut, to allow McCarthy to save face with his party, but these will be the least extreme things the hotheads are now clamoring for. McCarthy will then be forced to pass this budget with a whole lot of help from Democrats. Or (if McCarthy refuses to compromise) the government will shut down -- either in October or later in the year -- until he does.

As I said, no matter what happens McCarthy is going to wind up making some enemies within his own ranks. He swore, before he became speaker, that he'd never pass an omnibus budget bill through his chamber if he were in control. He may have to break that pledge, although the Senate could get him out of this jam by passing the 12 bills individually (it really doesn't matter whether they're lumped together or not, after all). Some House Republicans are going to scream if a C.R. is passed, some are going to scream if an omnibus winds up passing, and a whole bunch of them are going to scream when they crash into the brick-wall reality of the Senate and the White House being in Democratic hands. Even if McCarthy keeps all the radicals happy by shutting down the government for a while, if he does choose that route the moderates in his caucus will be the ones screaming at him.

And it's not just screaming, since any five Republican House members can boot McCarthy out of his speaker's chair at any time. The problem with doing so, of course, is that nobody else is likely to get enough support to be speaker, so this would just grind everything to an absolute halt without accomplishing anything.

The only thing that can be predicted for sure is that we've all got a whole lot of chaos and angst ahead. The House of Representatives cannot singlehandedly set budgetary policy, but many of McCarthy's Republicans just do not seem to understand this. The only real question is how long McCarthy will try to appease the radicals before he is forced to deal with the divided-government reality. Sooner or later, he will have to. But we've got a whole lot of melodrama to go through before we get to that point, that's my guess.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant