WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- Rep. Kevin McCarthy was forced to give in to a series of demands from detractors to win the support necessary to win the speaker’s gavel after a historic week of failed ballots.
While most GOP lawmakers are downplaying the significance of McCarthy’s concessions, the changes — which are designed to empower rank-and-file members at the expense of his own leadership authority — are also raising concerns that they could cripple the governing functions of the lower chamber.
One change in particular — which empowers a single lawmaker to launch the process of ousting the Speaker — is giving heartburn to lawmakers in both parties, who fear a hardline group of conservatives will use it repeatedly to browbeat McCarthy into keeping crucial must-pass bills off the floor.
The result, they say, will be a heightened risk of shuttering the government, defaulting on federal debts and grinding the business of the House to a screeching halt.
“I think it’s a terrible decision,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.).
Some of McCarthy’s conservative critics have also demanded that any move to raise the nation’s debt ceiling — which allows the government to borrow money to pay its obligations — must be accompanied by cuts in the nation’s entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare. And a provision of the new House rules package requires a separate vote on hiking the debt limit.
The protracted fight foreshadowed how difficult it would be for him to govern with an exceedingly narrow majority and an unruly hard-right faction bent on slashing spending and disrupting business in Washington. The speakership struggle that crippled the House before it had even opened its session

suggested that basic tasks such as passing government funding bills or financing the federal debt would prompt epic struggles over the next two years.
The floor fight dragged on for the better part of a week, the longest since 1859, and paralyzed the House, with lawmakers stripped of their security clearances because they could not be sworn in as official members of Congress until a speaker was chosen.
The concessions McCarthy agreed to, which he detailed in a party conference call early Friday, would diminish the speaker’s power considerably and make for an unwieldy environment in the House, where the slim Republican margin of control and the right-wing faction’s appetite for disarray had already promised to make it difficult to control.
“What we’re seeing is the incredibly shrinking speakership, and that’s most unfortunate for Congress,” former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said as she entered the chamber on Friday afternoon.
McCarthy agreed to allow a single lawmaker to force a snap vote at any time to oust the speaker, a rule that he had previously refused to accept, regarding it as tantamount to signing the death warrant for his speakership in advance.
Also part of the proposal, Republicans familiar with it said, was a commitment by the leader to give the ultraconservative faction approval over a third of the seats on the powerful Rules Committee, which controls what legislation reaches the floor and how it is debated. He also agreed to open government spending bills to a freewheeling debate in which any lawmaker could force votes on proposed changes.
The prolonged election prompted tension and uncertainty in the Capitol, where lawmakers in both parties had grown impatient and bored awaiting the outcome of a high-stakes struggle that seemed at once monumental and absurd.
“From the outside, it looks like chaos,” said Representative Ryan Zinke, Republican of Montana. “From the inside, it is.”