Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tina Nguyen.

It’s been a while since I’ve used the phrase “circular firing squad” to describe something political, but nothing else quite captures the aftermath of yesterday’s two failed House votes. Because who, exactly, is to blame for Alejandro Mayorkas dodging impeachment, and for Israel funding falling through? Shouldn’t G.O.P. leadership have known they didn’t have the votes? And who was supposed to count those votes, anyway?

In tonight’s edition, what Republicans are really saying under the Dome about Mike Johnson’s post-honeymoon period, post-C.R., post-impeachment reckoning—and how, regardless of everything collapsing beneath them, they’ll still try to blame it on the Dems.

But first, Abby Livingston’s P.O.V. on yesterday’s mayhem…

• As expected, the Senate failed to move forward on the big border/Ukraine/Israel bill. The usual Republican suspects backed it—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney—plus James Lankford, who negotiated the bill. Needless to say, his co-negotiators are livid. Democrat Chris Murphy did much of his venting on Tuesday, and Lankford used his floor time to call out an unnamed conservative commentator (presumably Jesse Kelly) who threatened to politically destroy him if he moved forward on the bill. Kyrsten Sinema, who chooses her public words carefully, gave a caustic speech on the Senate floor as well. She warned her colleagues not to come to Arizona for their border news conferences and photo ops: “Take your political theater to Texas. Do not bring it to my state.”

• As for the impeachment implosion, the surprise Republican nay came from Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican. That caught my attention because in conversations I’ve had with Republicans who hate Trump, it’s a near-constant refrain that he’s been their biggest disappointment on the big votes like this one. “These days, it is hard for a principled Republican to stick to their guns when they know it may cause blowback, but I’m always heartened to see when someone does it,” one of those Republicans told me. “He knows this impeachment push is trading short-term gain for long-term pain, and I was glad he stuck to his position.”

• Republicans seem intent on a second impeachment attempt once Steve Scalise returns from cancer treatment. But the margin issue is not going away. (N.B.: Nancy Pelosi misses no opportunity to taunt Republicans.) And the heroics of an ailing Al Green jumping in an Uber from the hospital to cast the tie-breaking vote is likely to go down in the annals of congressional lore and become an anecdote told and retold until there is a new Congress—and presumably a wider margin for whichever party wins the gavel.

• Finally, a parting word on the special election to replace George Santos. Tuesday’s night vote proved that Republicans desperately need to win this race, but Democrats also have skin in the game. The final media buys have been placed, and Team Blue is outspending Team Red by two-to-one on television. If Republican Mazi Pilip defeats Democrat Tom Suozzi, there will be an incredible amount of soul-searching within the Democratic Party—even though operatives on both sides have stressed to me that this is a highly localized race, and that tying the outcome to the events of the last week might be a stretch.

Republican leadership, however, seems to be receiving the brunt of the criticism—even with Scalise out. “It’s embarrassing,” a senior G.O.P. aide vented to me. “Those three guys, it’s their job to get the votes and make sure the votes are there prior to putting anything on the floor. Steve Scalise controls the floor. Tom Emmer is supposed to count the votes. Mike Johnson makes the ultimate decision. And all three are failing over and over and over again.”

The Johnson allies I’ve spoken to have floated a few ideas to recover the fumble, including a planned redo of the Mayorkas impeachment next week. The plan as of last night—and as always in the Johnson era, this could change—is to wait for Scalise to return next week, and/or for Long Islanders to elect Mazi Pilip on Tuesday in the special election to fill George Santos’s vacant seat. Pilip—who was born in Ethiopia, emigrated to Israel, served in the I.D.F., and was a registered Democrat before switching parties—is probably the ideal cross-partisan conservative for the district at a time when the top issue on voters’ minds, according to a January poll, is immigration. And the border crisis has only become more salient, according to a New York G.O.P. strategist, who noted that the New York Republican delegation had voted to impeach Mayorkas as well.

But even if Johnson can get impeachment through the House next week, the humiliation will linger. McClintock’s defection, in particular, came as a surprise to G.O.P. leadership, who were likewise blindsided by Democrats wheeling Rep. Al Green in from the hospital—literally still wearing the scrubs from his surgery—resulting in a 215-215 tie. (Republican Blake Moore changed his vote at the last second so the motion could be brought to the floor again in the future, presumably once Scalise returns.)

That embarrassment was compounded by a vote immediately afterward on Israel funding—something Johnson had signaled earlier in the week that he would push, though no one outside of leadership believed he’d do it that soon. According to Johnson’s allies, he had a reasonable strategy: After the collapse of the border supplemental funding bill last week, and facing a rapidly shrinking window when the House was in session, G.O.P. leadership believed that a clean Israel funding bill, stripped of balanced-budget gimmicks to appease hardliners, could make it through the House.

Republican leadership anticipated that there would be MAGA-aligned defectors—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Chip Roy, Ralph Norman, etcetera—given the bloc’s public position that they will not pass anything regarding security funding, even for Israel, until either the border is secure or the aid is paid for with budget cuts. But they also apparently believed that Democratic support would offset the Republican nays. “They thought they would get more Democrats to come across the aisle and support it, and they were surprised by how few, relatively speaking, did,” a Republican close to leadership told me. “They felt that pro-Israel-funding D’s would have to support it.”

In the end, however, only 46 Democrats crossed the aisle, leaving Johnson well short of the two-thirds majority he needed. Johnson and his allies, for now, are trying to pin the blame for the Israel funding collapse on the Democrats, with one arguing to me that Johnson had given Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries and Joe Biden everything they wanted with this bill. “They don't really have a leg to stand on now. They've been blocking it, really,” he said.

But breaking off more Democratic votes likely would have been impossible, given President Biden’s threat earlier this week to veto any security bill that didn’t include funding for Ukraine and Taiwan—something so blazingly obvious that, when I relayed Johnson’s strategy to my sources, they were shocked by it. “These are unforced errors that [leadership] could avoid!” the first senior G.O.P. aide vented to me. “Don’t have the votes for impeachment? Don’t put it on the floor. Don’t have the votes for Israel? Don’t put it on the floor.” Sure, Emmer should have anticipated how Democrats planned to vote, the aide conceded, but “he should be able to get the vote from Republicans.”

Instead, of course, Johnson now finds himself in much the same position as McCarthy some six months ago. No, he’s not in any immediate danger of a motion to vacate—that weapon is holstered, for now, as I reported the other week. Johnson has earned the grudging respect of many hardliners, or at least their recognition that he’s probably the best they’ll get this year. But Johnson has lost control of his conference, which he had hoped to straighten up into a more serious, strategic posture last fall. “He’s not thinking about [his legacy] yet, though he probably should,” the Republican said. “He’s too busy to think. It’s hour by hour, day by day.”

Indeed, the dual disaster of Tuesday’s floor votes was emblematic of Johnson’s lack of long-term strategic thinking—not just in terms of days, but perhaps in terms of hours, too. Again, luckily, it’s still widely agreed that Johnson should remain; there is—literally—no better option available. But unless Republicans can get on the same page or expand their majority—when the vote margin is this tight, it only takes a handful of medical emergencies or missed flights—Johnson is stuck in the same old McCarthyesque pickle.

“As far as people are concerned, he’s trying,” the Republican close to leadership told me when I caught up with him this week. “It’s just that they don’t have their act together as a team. It’s not just Johnson. It’s everybody. It’s Emmer. It’s Scalise. It’s the whole leadership structure. And, for that matter, it’s the rank and file. So the blame is all around.”