The agenda of congressional Republicans for this year consists of just one significant bill, and their leaders’ strategy for passing it appears to be rooted in the proposition that failing to pass it would be a disaster. That proposition is correct. Although the desire to avert disaster can be a powerful motivator, it is not a recipe for high morale in Congress, or for a particularly good new law.

The usual logic of legislation involves gaining the support necessary to advance your interests and priorities by providing your support to advance those of others. It’s a balance of achievements and concessions, and when it’s done well, nearly everyone involved can come out feeling as if they got more than they gave. But the logic of the tax bill being pushed forward in Congress this spring exhibits essentially none of these characteristics.

From the beginning, the underlying premise of this legislative effort has been that members will vote for a reconciliation bill only when they absolutely have to. The votes necessary to pass the bill could not be won by including in it the desired legislative aims of enough members to constitute a majority. Rather, those votes could be won only if the costs of failing to pass the bill seemed sufficient to terrify a majority of members into backing it.

This is in part because Republicans from the outset gave up on the prospect of attracting any Democrats to support the legislation. Consequently, the largest possible majority for it would be about three votes in each house, a situation that has left Republicans very little room to maneuver. Ironically, if they had started by seeking a bill that could gain the votes of, say, 25 House Democrats, they could have made it easier on themselves to move a more attractive measure. By giving more, they might have gotten more. They could have afforded to let a few of their own members vote against the bill, which could have served those members well at home, while also making it harder for some Democrats to oppose it. It might not have worked, of course. But trying it first would have created some room for making the bill more attractive to more members and their constituents.

In the absence of any such effort to broaden support, the bill was left dependent on party line backing from exceedingly narrow Republican majorities in both houses. This has meant that it must be shorn of ambition, and also that the case for it must be made almost entirely in the negative.

How will Republicans overcome their deepest internal policy differences, such as those about the state and local tax deduction? The pressure to pass a bill will force them to come to some agreement. How will members who have always resisted voting for a debt-ceiling increase be persuaded to do it now? The pressure to avoid being blamed for a calamity will do the trick. How will budget hawks be made to support massive increases in the deficit and debt? They will do it because otherwise they will be blamed for scuttling the Trump agenda. How will the enormous differences between the budget outlines of the House and the Senate be bridged? In the end, members will have no choice.

The pressure to avert the expiration of existing tax rates, to prevent a debt-ceiling disaster, to avoid sinking President Trump’s ambitions, and to keep from looking utterly incompetent before the midterm elections is expected to compel members to vote for a bill with relatively little policy appeal. Defense hawks may get a modest bump to the Pentagon’s budget, and it’s possible there will be some marginal added funding for immigration enforcement, but otherwise there will probably be little in this package to crow about.

As a practical matter, this approach has rendered this year’s budget process mostly a matter of pushing off hard questions for later — to maximize the pressure on members when the deadline nears.

The budget resolution that passed both houses in April, for instance, featured immense differences between the House and Senate that were simply left unaddressed. The annual budget resolution sets a floor of deficit reduction and a ceiling of deficit increases for each year’s appropriations process and assigns individual congressional committees specific amounts to pursue on both fronts. This year, the House set a floor of at least $2 trillion in deficit reduction and a ceiling of up to $2.8 trillion in deficit increases. The Senate, for the same year, set a floor of just $4 billion in deficit reduction (which, in an annual federal budget of nearly $7 trillion, is essentially zero) and a ceiling of nearly $6 trillion.

Rather than negotiate to close these yawning gaps, the two chambers passed a joint resolution that left in place the House instructions for House committees and the Senate ones for Senate committees. Leaders in both houses insisted they didn’t want to slow the process down, so they just didn’t resolve disagreements. And they surely also thought these immense differences could be more easily bridged later under the self-created pressure of a looming catastrophe.

The same has been true so far regarding potential spending cuts. Some House Republicans have talked about cost-saving reforms of Medicaid, and perhaps even Medicare, while their Senate counterparts have insisted no such cuts were in the offing. Even as they have begun to draft and mark up legislative language, the two chambers remain remarkably far apart on some basic parameters of the bill that they will ultimately need to pass together.

What will happen if the specter of calamity is not enough to move wavering members? Congressional Republicans assume that, when the moment comes, President Trump will step in to resolve their differences and force the hands of any holdouts.

Trump’s leverage may be a bit diminished, but it remains enormous. Although his approval with the general public has declined precipitously in recent weeks, he still has deep support among Republican voters, and especially the primary voters who matter above all to most congressional Republicans.

Of course, Trump’s substantive priorities in areas where congressional Republicans are divided are not always well defined. The president has said he opposes cuts to entitlement spending, for instance, and so reconciling competing Republican views on changes to Medicaid could spell trouble. And in some of the areas where Republicans are most divided — such as the fate of the state and local tax deduction — the president’s views will not easily override the concerns of members with the most intense interests, especially when those tend to be moderate Republicans whose voters don’t love Trump. But when push comes to shove, it’s a safe bet that the president will do all he can to move wavering members.

All of this is likely to make the coming months exceedingly unpleasant for many Republican members of Congress. The entire agenda of significant legislation for the year, and quite possibly for the whole of this Congress, has been packed into a single, messy bill that must be passed by fall, and all the work ahead consists of painful concessions.

And yet, none of this is to say that Republican leaders were wrong to pursue this grim strategy. House Speaker Mike Johnson was almost certainly right to insist that his chamber could pass only one reconciliation bill this year, and so to oppose splitting the agenda in two. And both he and Senate Majority Leader John Thune are likely right to assume that they can get their members to back the resulting monstrosity only by maximizing the cost of opposing it.

Already facing the possibility of a Trump-induced recession, Republicans cannot load unexpected tax increases onto their constituents. Already saddled with a sense that the GOP can’t govern, they cannot fumble the party’s entire legislative agenda and march the government into a debt default. Miserable as they will be this spring and summer, it still seems reasonably likely that congressional Republicans will enact at least a renewal of existing tax rates.

But to put the matter this way is to see the depth of the problem Republicans confront on Capitol Hill. The pain they are now feeling is a price paid not for later gain but only for avoiding an even worse calamity — if they are lucky.