A 'grueling obstacle course lies ahead' for Kevin McCarthy: op-ed

Now that California GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy has won the House Speakership after 15 rounds voting, but as Vanity Fair's Eric Lutz points out, "he’ll immediately be put to the test."

"As in the speakership vote, McCarthy can suffer only four defections within his party—and, already, one Republican member has said he’ll vote against the rules package, which includes measures making it easier to oust McCarthy as speaker and committee posts for Freedom Caucus members," Lutz writes.

Lutz contends that McCarthy now can't take any vote for granted. "This guy couldn’t even get his party unified around his speakership without agreeing to wear what [Matt Gaetz] called a political 'straitjacket”'—how is he going to broker a deal to keep the government open?"

Thanks to his concessions to the even more extreme members of his party, "who have proven capable of holding him hostage," Lutz writes that McCarthy "is sure to take an even harder line—to push for even more dramatic cuts to domestic and possibly even military spending—that could risk pushing the United States off a fiscal cliff."

Read the full op-ed over at Vanity Fair.