Over the past four years, Republicans have habituated themselves to demanding unilateral concessions from Democrats by threatening to inflict various kinds of damage on the country every few months. After a couple of early defeats, Democrats caught on to the emptiness of these threats, and the practice turned into a mostly harmless ritual, punctuated only once in 2013 when Democrats refused to gut the Affordable Care Act and Republicans shut down the government.

With that historical pattern in mind, it should stand to reason that Republicans will soon cave and agree to fund the Department of Homeland Security unconditionally for the next several months. For the most part, I think this is a safe bet. But the origins of Republicans' threat to shut down DHS are different than the origins of previous threats—and they increase the likelihood that Republicans will allow department financing to lapse without a strategy in place to restore it.

Unlike earlier hostage dramas, the DHS shutdown threat emerged as a form of deescalation. Back in December, many conservatives wanted Republican leaders to threaten a complete government shutdown unless President Obama agreed to dismantle his own deferred action programs for upstanding unauthorized immigrants. Republicans cobbled together the DHS shutdown plan in haste, to ward off a more damaging confrontation, but from the outset it was clear they hadn’t thought things through much further than that. Setting up this fight allowed them to avoid a total government shutdown, but it only worked because they sold it to those conservatives as a fight they could win.

Two months later, Democrats predictably filibustered a GOP bill to fund DHS and end the deportation programs, and GOP leaders are just as predictably hard-pressed to declare defeat and move on to the next thing. They promised victory, but they’ve only just joined the battle.

This explains why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is planning to replay Tuesday’s vote at least one more time before DHS funding lapses at the end of February. Perhaps another failed demonstration will be enough to convince his hardline faction that President Obama has the upper hand.