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.
It also revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of how rank-and-file members would react to having their power undermined by their leader.
“It’s the speaker’s job to protect the institution,” said Brendan Buck, a former top adviser to two Republican speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan. “I’m sympathetic in that way. But it’s also in the speaker’s purview to modernize the institution when needed, and sometimes letting the body work its will is the best outcome for everyone.”
Mr. Buck added: “It’s clear people are ready for this change. This was not a battle that needed to be waged.”
In moving to shut down the only recourse lawmakers have to force a vote on something a majority supports — an arduous process known as a discharge petition — Mr. Johnson angered even some Republicans who agreed with him in principle that proxy voting should not be allowed.
“My ‘no’ vote was about process — not whether new parents should be able to proxy vote,” Representative Greg Steube, Republican of Florida, wrote on social media after the vote. Mr. Steube, who signed on to a discharge petition last year in a bid to force action on a hurricane relief bill that would help his district, explained that his vote was a protest against Mr. Johnson’s effort to undermine “a century-old tool that empowers individual members to force a vote when leadership blocks legislation.”
Representative Anna Paulina Luna, the Florida Republican who has been leading the charge to allow proxy voting for new moms since she gave birth last year, had used the maneuver — a demand signed by 218 members of the House, the majority of the body — to force consideration of her measure to change the chamber’s rules.
Ms. Luna had succeeded in meeting that threshold and therefore had earned the right to have a vote on the resolution, Mr. Steube said.
For now, Mr. Johnson’s intransigence on the issue of proxy voting, coupled with his inability to corral enough members to side with him against it, has frozen the House floor as he struggles to figure out his next move.
Under House rules, Republican leaders are required to bring the proxy voting resolution to a vote within two legislative days. But in an effort to stall for time, Mr. Johnson simply canceled votes for the rest of the week and told members to go home.
It was Tuesday.
Capitol Hill staff members suddenly found themselves extremely available for coffees and drinks.
Proponents of the proxy voting resolution said they fully anticipated that Mr. Johnson would try and stop them again next week using the same tactic. They expect him to pair a measure to kill the proxy voting resolution with one needed to allow a vote on the G.O.P. budget plan including Mr. Trump’s fiscal priorities, in yet another effort to pressure Republicans into backing it.
“We’re looking at all options but that’s not something — that wasn’t my idea,” Mr. Johnson said Wednesday when asked about that move. “But we’re talking about everything.”
Another possibility that Mr. Johnson had considered earlier, according to people familiar with the matter, was raising the threshold of a discharge petition to be two-thirds of the House, instead of a majority. That would be a remarkable and precedent-setting change that would water down the power of individual lawmakers considerably.
Some Republicans are flummoxed about why Mr. Johnson has chosen this particular fight at all.
Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky and the rare independent voice in a tribal party, wrote on social media: “Congress literally shut down for an entire week over a spat about whether new moms and dads serving in the House of Representatives should be allowed to stay home and vote.”
Mr. Massie added: “Imagine if we were this passionate about saving the country from fiscal ruin and perpetual war.”
Mr. Johnson and his allies have argued that any accommodation that allows members to vote without being at the Capitol, no matter how narrow, creates a slippery slope for more, and fundamentally changes the nature of Congress, which exists to bring lawmakers together for discussion, debate and ultimately legislative action.
They note that the resolution has already expanded in scope. Ms. Luna’s original proposal would have allowed proxy voting for new mothers for only six weeks. When she later teamed with Democrats, they expanded it to include new fathers, as well, and expanded the time frame to 12 weeks.
On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Johnson wrote online that he empathized with the challenges of trying to govern as new parents. But, he said, “while I understand the pure motivations of the few Republican proxy vote advocates, I simply cannot support the change they seek.” He said that when the procedural vote failed, “it was Democrats who stood up and cheered” and the vast majority of the Republican conference who were disappointed.
Seated in her office on Wednesday afternoon and cradling her nine-week-old baby in her arms, Representative Brittany Pettersen, the Colorado Democrat who has partnered with Ms. Luna to champion parental leave from voting for members, said she was confident that the moms will ultimately prevail. But she said she expected another round of battling next week before they do.
“What I think he’s doing is trying to pull Trump to be involved,” she said, referring to Mr. Johnson. “I’m sure it’s not a fight Trump wants to engage in. We should call his daughter, who worked so hard on paid family medical leave. Wouldn’t she think that moms should have a voice in Congress?”
(When she served in his administration, Mr. Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, worked on the issue of paid family leave.)
Ms. Pettersen said she took note of the fact that no Republican women broke with Mr. Johnson on Tuesday, including one who is currently pregnant, Representative Kat Cammack of Florida. But she hoped they would ultimately vote for the resolution if and when it came to the floor.
Ms. Pettersen was on her way back to her office on Tuesday when she was told that Mr. Johnson had canceled votes for the rest of the week after his failed bid to kill her proposal.
“Stunning,” she said of the move. “This is his hill to die on? Let us vote on this.”
