THE leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination include eight more or less distinguished politicians, such as Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, and two men, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, with no political experience and some odd ideas. Mr Trump wants to deport 11.3m people in two years; Mr Carson thinks being gay is a matter of choice and the Affordable Care Act the “worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery”. Polls suggest these greenhorn screwballs command more than half the Republican vote. To understand why Americans are so fed up with politicians, it would be reasonable to start with the government shutdown of September 2013, when the failure of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to pass a budget led to about 800,000 federal employees being sent home for 12 days and the mothballing of numerous government programmes and services. This was estimated to have cost the economy $24 billion in lost output; it also hurt the Republicans.

At the time, almost half of Americans said the shutdown had cost them and most blamed the GOP—even if the nation’s disdain for Congress at the time was a lesson in bipartisanship. Only around a quarter of voters, Republican or Democratic, said they were satisfied with their congressional representative.

You might think the Republicans, now in control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, would want to avoid a repeat of that embarrassing, damaging episode. Yet the prospect of another shutdown looms. Lawmakers have only 12 days to pass a fresh budget for the fiscal year beginning on October 1st; or, if they cannot, to sign off on a stopgap agreement, called a “continuing resolution”, which would maintain the current rates of expenditure for three or four months. Their progress is discouraging.

An ambitious budget deal is out of the question. President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress want to increase spending on welfare, education and environmental protection; Republicans want to slash those budgets and hike defence spending. There is little appetite for compromise on either side. So far, so normal: Congress has not completed the full budget process, which involves passing a dozen separate appropriations bills, since 1994. More startling is a growing risk that opposition from conservative Republicans could block the anticipated compromise.

The main obstacle is a row over the half a billion dollars a year an organisation called Planned Parenthood, which carries out abortions, draws from federal and state coffers. The group has been accused by anti-abortion activists of profiting from the sale of foetus parts. It denies the allegation. It also protests that it spends its government money on cancer screenings, treating syphilis and other services—the abortions are funded separately.

No matter: around 40 conservative lawmakers in the so-called Freedom Caucus (as well as Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas whose narcissistic showboating was chiefly to blame for the 2013 shutdown and who is now seeking his party’s presidential nomination) have sworn to “defund” Planned Parenthood. Yet if the House seeks to do so in a budget agreement, this would probably be shot down in the senate, and otherwise vetoed by Mr Obama. The result, yet again, would be the government running out of cash.

Republican leaders in the House are appalled. They do not want to be blamed for that; the Republican speaker John Boehner, a staunch Catholic, may also fear the reputational damage this could do to the pro-life lobby he passionately supports. He has three possible solutions, none of which looks especially tempting.

He assayed the first on September 18th, when the House passed a freestanding bill to defund Planned Parenthood for a year; Republican bosses plainly hope this will convince the Freedom Caucus to back a straightforward continuing resolution. This ploy may not work, however. The new bill is doomed to fail, because the senate will not pass it, and Mr Obama would anyway veto it.

Another option for Mr Boehner would be to circumvent the hard-liners in his own party by instead persuading House Democrats to support the required continuing resolution. They are willing: “We want to be cooperative,” Nancy Pelosi, their leader in the House, said on September 17th. But this would be damaging for a Republican leadership that, having failed to sabotage Mr Obama’s administration as many hardliners want, is already derided by many in its own camp.

A third possibility would be to give the Freedom Caucus the conflict its members want, by simply failing to pass a budget, and thereby allowing the government to be shut down; but only for a day or two, before hurrying through the necessary compromise. For sure, that would be less costly than last time around. It would be shameful nonetheless.