House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sang a triumphant note on Tuesday morning as the Senate border deal he spent days lobbying against teetered on the edge of defeat.
“It looks like right now, it may be in some jeopardy. It may be on life support in the Senate,” he told reporters at a press conference. “We welcome that development.”
Within hours, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) conceded the compromise had “no real chance,” attributing its downfall directly to the speaker’s proclamation that it was “dead on arrival” in the House.
The measure’s swift demise — it fell apart within 24 hours of being unveiled — was a setback for President Joe Biden, who had blessed the border agreement and even gave an address calling for its passage the same day.
Yet Johnson suffered an equally stunning defeat when a vote to impeach Biden’s border chief narrowly failed on the House floor Tuesday evening.
Minutes later, another black eye for Johnson: Democrats denied him the votes needed to pass aid for Israel after Biden threatened to veto the legislation.
Impeaching Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary presiding over a crisis at the southern border, would have signified a political indictment of Biden, whose policies Republicans blame for the record influx of immigrants.
Instead, the failed vote handed the White House an opportunity to portray the effort as an exercise in rank partisanship.
“Clearly, there is bipartisan agreement that this baseless, unconstitutional impeachment stunt should fail,” a White House spokesman said on Tuesday night.
The political calculations at play with the Israel vote are more complex.
Biden wants to see money for Ukraine, a political lightning rod among Republicans, paired with at least $14 billion in assistance for Israel, which is far more popular.
A stand-alone vote on the Israel portion served to pressure Biden to decouple the two, but the two-thirds majority Johnson needed for the measure to pass doomed it in the lower chamber.
Johnson was left licking his wounds on a day that should have been a major rout for him politically.
The failures are not irrecoverable. The speaker could try moving the Israel aid through regular order, which only requires a majority vote to pass.
And the Mayorkas impeachment only fell apart because Democrats wheeled Rep. Al Green (D-TX), fresh out of the surgery room, into the chamber to cast a surprise vote against it.
House Republicans can hold another vote once Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) returns to Washington from cancer treatment as soon as next week.
But the chaos on the House floor has ignited fresh questions about Johnson’s judgment as he battles a president with decades of political experience. Johnson has held the gavel since October.
Biden will use Senate Republicans’ rejection of the border deal to paint the party as beholden to former President Donald Trump, who joined forces with Johnson to oppose the legislation.
The president can cite his willingness to come to the negotiating table and Republicans’ willingness to walk away.
“Frankly, they owe it to the American people to show some spine and do what they know to be right,” Biden said of Senate Republicans as the deal fell apart.
Nonetheless, Republicans believe they denied Biden a political win on a measure they doubted would actually have solved the border crisis.
For months, McConnell demanded that Ukraine aid be paired with border security and blocked a vote on the assistance in December to force a compromise.
In part, he pursued that compromise because Republicans were demanding it. With Ukraine aid at stake, he wanted a bill that could pass the House.
The deal he walked away with, however, was not conservative enough for Johnson. It clamped down on asylum claims and gave the president new authority to shut down the border, but missing from the proposal was the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy and other demands of House Republicans.
In essence, Johnson viewed the bill as a lopsided agreement that favored Democrats on politics and policy. Of course, that was always going to be the outcome, given their control of the White House and Senate.
Johnson won the intraparty dispute with McConnell, in effect torpedoing any chance border security will be tackled before the November election.
The new challenge will be navigating the thorny topic of Ukraine.
Johnson has left the door open to further assistance, even as he demands accountability measures and a public articulation from Biden on how the war with Russia ends.
But he will face the same insistence from his right flank to kill whatever the Senate passes. Already, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is eyeing a defense bill for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan minus the border provisions.
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Johnson tried once before to force Biden to split off the Ukraine money, passing a stand-alone bill for Israel that offset the cost with IRS cuts in November.
His failure on Tuesday to move a clean Israel bill that could actually pass the Senate has weakened his hand going into that fight.
