WASHINGTON — 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 Donald Trump to keep Republicans in line. And it raised questions about whether Johnson, in his haste to transform the House into an organ of compliance to 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 Johnson told reporters in an interview 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.”

Johnson noted that “96% 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 GOP.

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 Trump acting as his outside enforcer, 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.”

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 — 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,” Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., wrote on social media after the vote. 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 Johnson’s effort to undermine “a century-old tool that empowers individual members to force a vote when leadership blocks legislation.”

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., 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.

Luna had succeeded in meeting that threshold and therefore had earned the right to have a vote on the resolution, Steube said.

For now, Johnson’s intransigence on the issue of proxy voting, coupled with his inability to corral enough members to side with him against it, have 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, 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 Johnson would try to 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 GOP budget plan including Trump’s fiscal priorities, in yet another effort to pressure Republicans into backing it.

Another possibility that 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 on why Johnson has chosen this particular fight at all.