Johnson stumbles, deepening Republican disarray and his own challenges
As one of the most painful defeats of his short term occurred on Tuesday, Speaker Mike Johnson had positioned himself in the center of the House of Representatives chamber, standing in front of the speaker's ceremonial chair on the top row of the rostrum to to hammer this down.
As Republicans subdued their own attempt to oust Alejandro N. Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security, Mr. Johnson, who had stood guard in the House of Representatives minutes earlier, was the face of the failure, with a somewhat panicked look on his face and his cheeks flushed as he announced the loss.
The House then moved to a second vote that Mr. Johnson had orchestrated, on a $17.6 billion aid package for Israel that he knew would not generate the votes needed to pass.
It also failed.
The back-to-back defeats underlined the litany of problems Mr Johnson inherited the day he was elected speaker, and his inexperience in the job, some 100 days after he was catapulted from rank-and-file to the top position in the House of Representatives. Saddled with a razor-thin margin of control and a deeply divided conference that repeatedly proved to be a majority in name only, he has struggled to rally his unruly colleagues and made a series of decisions that only compounded his own challenges.
Mr Johnson was optimistic on Wednesday, portraying the night before's dysfunction as the kind of messy democratic process the founding fathers had envisioned.
“The job will be done and we will govern,” he told reporters near the House floor. “This country is the greatest country in the history of the world. The whole world is counting on us. We have steady hands on the wheel. We'll get through it. Everyone take a deep breath. It's a long game.”
But the next phase of that game could be even more challenging. In the coming days, Mr. Johnson is likely to face a decision on whether to bring up a Ukraine aid package pending in the Senate — a measure that many Republicans in the House of Representatives see as unacceptable. And just weeks away is a March 1 deadline to fund the government and avoid a partial shutdown, a problem that Republican speakers have so far only been able to address with emergency bills passed with Democratic votes.
“When you're given the keys to the kingdom, so to speak, when you have the majority, there's an expectation that you can govern, and we've struggled with that time and time again,” said Rep. Steve Womack. , Republican of Arkansas.
The scene that unfolded in the House of Representatives on Tuesday evening caused widespread dismay among Republicans, who assumed that Johnson had gone ahead with the impeachment vote because he was confident he had the votes to pass the bill. approve.
“I've followed every rule that the party has laid out about how we can't surprise them before a vote,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, one of three Republicans who broke with the party to oppose the measure. “We moved forward with a vote. We didn't have to be embarrassed. We could have just waited until the math was different and moved on.”
It appeared that Republican leaders had misjudged both the intensity of opposition to the measure among defectors and the number of Democrats who would be present to vote.
And then Rep. Al Green of Texas, a Democrat who had missed earlier votes this week after undergoing abdominal surgery, made a surprise break from the hospital to cast a tie-breaking vote condemning the measure.
“We have a razor-thin margin here and every vote counts,” Mr Johnson said on Wednesday. “Sometimes when you're counting votes and people show up and they're not expected to be in the building, it changes the equation.”
Mr Johnson had personally spoken to some of those left behind on the morning of the vote in what he described as “thoughtful, intellectual discussions”. And in the minutes before, he had even confronted Mr Gallagher in the cloakroom in an attempt to change his mind.
Mr. Gallagher remained unmoved.
“Do you support the principle that you can accuse a Cabinet Secretary of blatant mismanagement if no crime has been committed?” he said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” explaining his voice. “We are pointing a loaded gun at the next Trump administration.”
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a famous vote counter, had no choice but to offer unsolicited advice to Mr. Johnson.
“You have to have votes. Don't worry about the other side; you have to have your voice,” she said. 'You know what a majority is. If you don't have that, don't bring it to the floor.”
Many Republicans admit that Mr. Johnson is in a no-win position. His majority continues to shrink.
He continues to operate under terms negotiated by his predecessor that allow a single lawmaker to call a snap vote to impeach him — a mechanism that casts a shadow over the speaker even if no one ever actually initiates it.
And because he was catapulted to the top position nearly ten months after this convention, he has none of the carrots and sticks at his disposal that a speaker can typically dole out at the start of the session to buy loyalty, such as plum committee assignments.
He angered some mainstream Republicans months ago when he proposed an Israeli aid bill coupled with spending cuts — then angered the party's right wing this week by putting forward an Israeli aid package without them.
Mr Johnson had tried to blame Democrats for undermining the bill, calling it an “embarrassing” vote for the party at a time when the country's ally needed help. But he knew long in advance that they would not embrace the measure. President Biden had threatened to veto and Democratic leaders had denounced the move as a cynical ploy to undermine aid to Ukraine. He also knew that right-wing Republicans were opposed, leading him to bring the measure up through special procedures that allow him to pass a measure quickly but require a two-thirds majority.
Rep. Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, said that when Mr. Johnson initially introduced an Israeli aid bill, combined with budget cuts, the speaker “broke several generations of what I call a bad path.”
“By passing that bill last night, I think he took a step back,” Biggs said.
And that was after the failed impeachment vote.
“The argument would be, 'You should have pulled it if you didn't think we were going to win,'” said Rep. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, the chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee. “If you only have a one or two vote margin, you never know what's going to happen.”
Mr. Hern predicted that Republicans would “just see more of this.”
“It's very difficult,” he said. 'The speaker has pointed this out several times. We are working in unprecedented times” with small margins.
Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, went further, concluding that “getting rid of Speaker McCarthy has officially become an unmitigated disaster.”
“All work on separate spending accounts has been halted,” Mr Massie continued in a social media post. “Cutbacks have been exchanged for spending increases. Espionage without guarantee has been temporarily extended. Our majority has shrunk.”
Kayla Guo And Lucas Broadwater reporting contributed.