The Republican speaker, who has mostly wielded power by relying on the threat of retribution from President Trump, has chosen an institutional fight it’s not clear he can win.
Speaker Mike Johnson’s failed effort this week to shut down a bipartisan bid to allow new parents in Congress to vote remotely after the birth of a child highlighted the limits of his power and intensified a fight that has ground the House to a halt.
The clash underscored — yet again — how dependent the speaker has become on President Trump to keep Republicans in line. And it raised questions about whether Mr. Johnson, in his haste to transform the House into an organ of compliance to Mr. Trump, may have lost sight of the importance of gauging what rank-and-file lawmakers will and will not tolerate.
Instead, he ran roughshod over the will of a majority of House members — something speakers throughout history have done at their peril — and chose a battle it’s not clear he can win.
“Disappointing result on the floor there,” a hangdog Mr. Johnson told reporters in an interview on Tuesday, after nine Republicans defied him and voted with a united bloc of Democrats to keep the proxy voting measure alive. “Very unfortunate in this case.”
Mr. Johnson noted that “96 percent of House Republicans voted against it.” But that was a statistic that didn’t really matter when what he needed was near-unanimity within the G.O.P.
It was a tacit admission that his strong-arm tactics to try to block a vote on a measure that a majority of House members backed had been a miscalculation. The embarrassment on the floor was a cold reminder that without Mr. Trump acting as his outside enforcer, Mr. Johnson wields far less power over his fractious conference.
