Johnson faced an uphill battle in maintaining the speaker's gavel and eked out a win after initially coming up short.

But Johnson is also in trouble because many of the key votes ostensibly for him look more like votes for the Republican agenda in spite of him. After the vote, leaders of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of about three dozen right-wing,

Making Democrats look bad by defending trans women — or look bad by not defending trans women — isn’t Republicans’ end goal here.