The bruising roll call tally — coming on the heels of a weeklong revolt — had some GOP members asking privately whether John Boehner can hold on to his leadership post. Boehner's gamble: Could it cost him his job?

No one risked more — for himself and for his party — on the bailout bill than House Republican leader John A. Boehner.

The result: He lost.


The Ohio Republican went all in for the $700 billion economic rescue package. But when the gavel came down on the vote Monday, 133 of Boehner’s 199 Republicans had gone the other way.

The bruising tally — coming on the heels of a weeklong revolt — had some GOP members asking privately whether Boehner can hold on to his leadership post.

Boehner said he’s confident of his job, but the vote clearly took its toll.

The leader lost the support of some of his closest allies in the House — including Iowa Rep. Tom Latham and California Rep. Devin Nunes, two drinking buddies who helped lay the foundation for Boehner’s political comeback in 2006.

Another Boehner ally, Rep. Thaddeus G. McCotter of Michigan, physically turned his back on the leader during a tense closed-door GOP conference meeting Sunday night.

People who were in the room said McCotter left abruptly after Boehner told members not to attack one another. Boehner tried to reach out to McCotter as he left. McCotter kept walking.

“I have some members who would do anything for me, and I talked to them, and it just killed them, absolutely killed them, when they told me they couldn’t vote yes,” Boehner told a small group of reporters after Monday’s stunning floor defeat.

He said he did everything he could.

“You can’t break their arms, you can’t put your whole relationship on the line, ask them to do something that they do not want to do and have that member regret that vote for the rest of their life,” Boehner said. “Twenty years from now, nobody will care how anyone voted except those members. You can’t do that. You just can’t.”

McCotter said Boehner will survive this vote.

“You can’t abandon a man who at his core respects that you can have principled differences,” McCotter said. “That’s why all of us still love him.”

From the beginning, Boehner has let his members do what they want. He campaigned for the top job by telling Republicans he would not lean on them as his predecessor, former Texas Rep. Tom DeLay, was wont to do.

But that long leash has been problematic at times — never, though, like it was on Monday.

Democrats were quick to dance on Boehner’s grave on Monday — even though some of the Republicans who could someday replace him might be less gracious in negotiations than he has been.

“I guess the Republican leadership is so weak John Boehner couldn’t deliver 50 percent of the votes,” Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey (D-Wis.) told a scrum of reporters shortly after the vote. “I thought these were big boys.”

In the 10 days leading up to Monday’s vote, Boehner worked quietly with Democrats and the White House to push a plan resembling what Treasury sent to Capitol Hill. Along the way, he eased opposition by co-opting some of his leadership colleagues — tapping Republican Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri, a one-time challenger, to negotiate the deal with the Bush administration and Democrats in both chambers.

Boehner and Blunt, in turn, were able to work with the White House to persuade Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor — a potential Boehner rival — and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan to support the measure and speak in favor of it at a three-hour meeting Sunday night, despite the fact that the two had taken the lead in crafting a Republican alternative that solidified opposition to the underlying bill.

One member called it a “master stroke” on Boehner’s part — but it wasn’t enough.

After Monday’s defeat, Boehner and other Republicans said a speech by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had cost some GOP votes. In fact, some Republican aides began spreading word before her speech even ended that her remarks would turn the tide against them.

“We had a dozen members that we thought that we had a really good chance of getting on the floor,” Boehner told reporters afterward. “And all that evaporated when the speaker spoke.”

Democrats dismiss the charge as nonsense — as a Pelosi aide said, members vote on bills, not speeches.

And the fact remains that a majority of Democrats stood with Pelosi while a majority of Republicans put distance between themselves and Boehner.

On some level, the problem was a lack of discipline. House Republicans lack the clear leadership chain that characterized their tenure in the majority under DeLay. The member-to-member relationships were much closer, so the whips typically had a better sense where votes stood before heading to the floor.

Boehner lacks the heft of former Speaker Dennis Hastert, who could always flip a few core votes in the final days before a tough roll call, and his party lacks any other heavy now that President Bush has only a few months left in office.

As the House prepared to vote Monday, Boehner delivered an astonishingly nonpartisan speech, telling the members who had already assembled on the House floor: “I don’t know that they get much tougher than this. No one wants to vote for this.”

When he finished, Boehner got more applause from Democrats than Republicans. He strode up the aisle and back to the cloakroom to wait for the vote to begin.

During the vote, Boehner walked the floor by himself, gently jawboning wavering colleagues when he could. But he did not seem to turn any votes, and the numbers grew steadily against him.

By Monday afternoon, staff members in the offices of Republican leaders were blaming one another for the failed vote.

Blunt said he had come to the floor thinking 75 Republicans would support the plan. He was off by 10 — just short of the 12 that were needed to turn defeat into victory.

But Boehner told a different story. He said that the GOP leaders never thought they’d get more than 68 Republicans to support the bill — and that he sent Blunt to tell Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) as much nearly two hours before the vote.

“I sent [Blunt] down to talk to Hoyer, 11:30, quarter to 12, somewhere in that time frame,” Boehner said. “We had a pretty good idea where we were, where we thought we could get to. And Hoyer knew.”

Boehner added: “I did not talk to [Hoyer], so I don’t know what their conversation was. [Blunt] and I had that conversation. We talked about ‘Should we just rise [walk out]?’ It wouldn’t have been good, but I thought it would have been better than this. It really doesn’t make any difference.”

Democrats, for their part, said they assumed Blunt was lowballing his whip count to force Pelosi and the Democrats to line up more votes from their members.

In the end, as Pelosi and her team tried to flip votes in favor of the proposal, there was little Boehner or his Republican leadership team could do to entice those who voted “no” to switch their tally in support of the controversial measure.

“Given the unpopularity of this whole concept, it’s amazing that we got as many votes as we did,” Boehner said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misquoted Boehner's comments about his efforts to round up Republican votes.