WASHINGTON — After a grueling five-day, 15-ballot floor fight for speaker, House Republicans on Monday night will face what’s expected to be the first of many tough legislative battles ahead: Passing a package of rules that will govern how they run the House over the next two years.

A rules package at the start of a new Congress typically is not controversial, but because of the GOP’s fragile majority and concerns about Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s last-minute deal with the far-right Freedom Caucus, GOP vote counters are furiously working to hold the line.

One member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, Rep. Tony Gonzeles, R-Texas, has said that some of McCarthy’s concessions to conservative agitators went too far and reiterated Sunday he’ll be voting no. Another self-described pragmatist, Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said over the weekend that she’s “on the fence.”

“This is only the beginning. These are the easy part[s], the speaker vote and the rules vote,” Gonzales said on Fox News on Monday. “But I guarantee you, nobody expected 15 rounds of voting. … No one said it’s going to be four days, 15 rounds of voting and your families are going to be run through the ringer.

“As bad as it was to watch it, it was even worse to be part of it,” Gonzales continued. “Who wants to see this fiasco get played out over and over again?”

Because of their razor-thin majority, McCarthy’s leadership team can only afford to lose four GOP votes on the rules package for the new Congress. Failure to pass it could blow up the delicate deal McCarthy cut last week with the Freedom Caucus to secure the speaker’s gavel.

One provision in the rules package — demanded by conservatives and slammed by moderates — would lower the threshold to just a single lawmaker to force a floor vote to oust McCarthy from the speaker’s office during these next two years.

Another rules change, secured by conservatives, would ban the practice of automatically raising the federal debt ceiling when Congress passes a budget resolution. It means that the House and Senate will need to take a separate vote to hike the nation’s borrowing limit, and Republicans have said they will be demanding massive spending cuts in exchange.

That is sure to result in a fiscal standoff between House Republicans and Democrats, who control the White House and Senate, when the country hits its $31.4 trillion debt limit, which is expected to happen late in the summer.

GOP leaders, including new Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana, indicated Monday that they believe Republicans will be able to stick together and pass the rules package.

“Obviously the rules package is the first piece allowing us to get started with our agenda to fight for the American people,” Scalise told reporters. “And that was the real goal of the rules changes, to open up the process.”

Other rules changes proposed in the package include:

• Requiring that new spending has to be offset with cuts elsewhere in the budget.
• Requiring that lawmakers get 72 hours to read a bill before it’s brought to the floor.
• Allowing the House to vote to create a select subcommittee focused on investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the “weaponization of the federal government.”
• Gutting the Office of Congressional Ethics, the nonpartisan, independent office that investigates lawmakers.

Scott Wong

Scott Wong is a senior congressional reporter for NBC News. 

Haley Talbot contributed.