Carl Hulse of The New York Times makes a very important point as the Congress lurches toward yet another budget hooley this week. Through a mixture of boneheaded politics, acts of God, better job offers, and the walking catastrophe that was Rep. George Santos, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives is down to very close to nothing.

This week, with lawmakers absent for medical reasons and the recent not-so-voluntary departures of the ousted former speaker Kevin McCarthy and the expelled Mr. Santos, the best G.O.P. attendance that Speaker Mike Johnson can muster as he tries to avoid a government shutdown is the bare-minimum 218 votes. That is before factoring in the impact of rough winter weather across the nation. Another Republican, Representative Bill Johnson of Ohio, is resigning as of Sunday to take a job as a university president, lowering the number to 217 if Representative Harold Rogers of Kentucky, the 86-year-old dean of the House, is unable to quickly return from recuperating from a car accident. Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, is out until at least next month while undergoing cancer treatment.

This puts Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries securely in the catbird seat, and it completely gives the Senate Republicans the whip hand over their bat-guano colleagues at the other end of the Capitol. And it leaves Speaker Mike Johnson on an atoll with the sea rising around him.

Whether it does or not, Republicans are in a real numerical bind. At a time when House Republicans regularly face internal rebellion from hard-line conservatives, Mr. Johnson has absolutely no cushion if he chooses to rely strictly on the votes of his own party, which is part of the reason he cut a deal with Democrats on spending to avoid a shutdown later this week, further angering the hard right. Mr. Johnson, the novice speaker, said it was a problem he could handle. “I’m undaunted by this,” he said recently on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “We deal with the numbers that we have...We do have, I think, a lot of unity on the big, important issues that we’re really focused on,” Mr. Johnson said. “And I’m confident that we’ll get the job done and be able to demonstrate that we can govern well, and I think that’s one of the reasons that we will expand this majority in the next election cycle.”

The very first thing that the new Republican majority in the House did upon taking over was eliminate remote voting, only because it was a program begun by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. This was a bad idea that looks even worse for them now. Meanwhile, there was a short-term funding deal negotiated over the weekend, which set the flying monkeys in the House aloft one more time. Meanwhile, there's a stirring in the Capitol of actual governing. It's a fragile critter in a very strange place.

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Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. 

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