It is finished. Or is it? On the contrary, the battle has just begun.

As everyone on the planet is surely aware by now, Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy became Speaker of the House in the wee hours of Saturday morning after four grueling days, 15 ballots, back-room dealing, shouting, and near fisticuffs between two GOP congressmen. Now the real battle begins — in earnest.

“That was easy, huh?,” McCarthy joked, after accepting the gavel, “We never thought we’d get up here.”

I hope one thing is clear after this week: I will never give up. I will never give up [on] you, the American people. And I will never give up on keeping our Commitment to America.

As my colleague Nick Arama reported, the new Speaker pledged to follow through on the concessions he made in exchange for hold-out members of the GOP Caucus to instead vote “present,” vs. voting for a different nominee, thus lowering his threshold for victory to 216 votes.

The Californian stressed that his responsibility, first and foremost, is to America:

As Speaker of the House, my ultimate responsibility is not to my party, my conference, or even our Congress. My responsibility – our responsibility – is to our country. Two months ago, you voted for a new direction for our country. You embraced our Commitment to America. And now, we are going to keep our commitment to you.

While McCarthy’s hand as Speaker of the 118th Congress was weakened by multiple comprises with Republican hardliners, it’s my belief that the GOP-controlled chamber will be stronger as it faces the ever-more-bitter Democrat Party as a result of intra-party deal-making to secure the gavel.

Here’s more, as reported by Just the News:

The Speakership race exposed a long-simmering divide between establishment Republicans with a penchant for conceding to last-minute spending laws that have bloated the national debt from $6 trillion to $32 trillion over the last two decades and the more restless, rebellious members of the House Freedom Caucus forged in the fires of the Tea Party and MAGA movements and their take-no-hostages tactics.

The 20 Republicans who held out for more than a dozen votes to deprive McCarthy of the gavel forced sweeping concessions in the rules package that govern how Congress operates and votes. Those concessions substantially shifted the power to decide what issues will be voted upon and what will be spent from tax dollars to House majority leadership – where it has resided for more than two decades – to rank-and-file members.

[W]ith a House in which the parties are divided by just a few seats, the new rules will not only empower rank-and-file Republicans to demand more of their leaders, it will also give Democrats unprecedented power to gum up the House agenda from their minority position.

The sweeping new rules resemble those of House Speaker Newt Gingrich after winning the gavel in 1995, due in large part to the GOP’s Contract with America, which Gingrich and the Republicans used to balance the budget for the first time in decades between a Republican-led Congress and the Clinton White House.

“Let me be clear,” McCarthy vowed: “We will use the power of the purse and the power of the subpoena to get the job done.”

Look, politicians make political speeches — it’s what they do. But now McCarthy has the chance he’s coveted since 2015 to get ‘er done.

As I argued in a Friday op-ed titled It’s Long Past Time for the Republican Party to Take a Few Pages From the Democrat Playbook, it’s now incumbent on the Republicans to roll up their sleeves and fight Democrat fire with similar fire, including the inclusion of the emotional aspects of conservatism (of which there are many) into their arguments,  and repackaging messaging accordingly — given that Democrats largely win on emotion vs. hard facts.

Moreover, the fatal notion of appealing only to one’s peanut gallery (see: Donald Trump) must give way to consciously working to win back independent voters and Republican voters who didn’t show up in 2020. Argue the observation all you want, but facts are facts.

Now that the gavel is secured, as I wrote on Thursday, there’s a larger war to come.

How ’bout we win this one, for a change?