As Republicans tanked their own bid to impeach Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, Mr. Johnson, who minutes before had been buttonholing holdouts on the House floor, was the face of the failure, a slightly panicked look on his face and his cheeks flushed as he announced the loss.
Then the House moved on to a second vote Mr. Johnson had orchestrated, on a $17.6 billion aid package for Israel that he knew would not muster the votes it needed to pass.
It also failed.
The back-to-back defeats highlighted the litany of problems Mr. Johnson inherited the day he was elected speaker and his inexperience in the position, roughly 100 days after being catapulted from the rank and file to the top job in the House. Saddled with a razor-thin margin of control, and a deeply divided conference that has proved repeatedly to be a majority in name only, he has struggled to corral his unruly colleagues and made a series of decisions that only added to his own challenges.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Saddled with a razor-thin margin of control, and a deeply divided conference that has proved repeatedly to be a majority in name only, he has struggled to corral his unruly colleagues and made a series of decisions that only added to his own challenges.
And looming just weeks away is a March 1 deadline to fund the government and avert a partial shutdown, a problem that Republican speakers so far have only been able to answer with stopgap spending bills passed with Democratic votes.
He continues to operate under terms negotiated by his predecessor that allow a single lawmaker to call a snap vote to oust him — a mechanism that casts a shadow over the speaker even if no one ever actually puts it into motion.
And because he was catapulted to the top job almost 10 months into this Congress, he has none of the carrots or sticks at his disposal that a speaker typically can dole out at the beginning of the session to buy allegiances, such as plum committee assignments.
But he knew well in advance that they would not embrace the measure, which President Biden had threatened to veto and Democratic leaders had denounced as a cynical ploy to try to undercut aid for Ukraine.
Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, said that when Mr. Johnson had initially put forward an Israel aid bill paired with spending cuts, the speaker was “breaking multi-generations of what I call a bad path.”
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