McCarthy Brought His Detractors in From the Cold. Will They Stay?

Russell T. Vought, the former Trump administration budget director who now leads the hard-right Center for Renewing America and who helped lead opposition to Mr. McCarthy’s speakership, argued it was a natural outgrowth of what he called the “coalition government” that Mr. McCarthy’s concessions created.

“Most of the 20 realize that post-power sharing agreement, they are now governing themselves, and you make different decisions when you are actually having to bring along the entirety of your conference,” Mr. Vought said. “You govern from the right, but when push comes to shove, you’ve got to put something out that can pass, and I think you saw that this week.”

Mr. McCarthy also had little choice, given the tiny margin of control he has in the House and the large number of hard-right lawmakers in his ranks, a dynamic that was made painfully clear during his battle for his job.

“It forced some unlikely bedfellows into a room together; it forced people to get to know one another,” said Representative Garret Graves of Louisiana, a key leadership ally who has helped Mr. McCarthy win the votes both to become speaker and to pass the debt limit bill.

Mr. McCarthy honed some of those tactics in 2011, when he served as Mr. Boehner’s whip during debt ceiling negotiations. He began taking the pulse of restive Tea Party freshmen on the negotiations in so-called listening sessions that the current whip, Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, resurrected earlier this year.

At that time, outside right-wing groups were growing increasingly influential. Their leaders, especially at Heritage Action, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, encouraged lawmakers to defy Mr. Boehner at every turn.

It could have gone the same way for Mr. McCarthy. Instead, when Mr. McCarthy unveiled House Republicans’ debt limit bill, he had key conservatives within his conference praising it, and the outside groups agitating for its passage. Heritage Action announced that it would penalize lawmakers who voted against the bill on its public rating system.