Kevin McCarthy’s election as the new majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives puts the Republican majority in the House in a quandary.

It’s because of the congressional district McCarthy represents.

McCarthy comes from the Bakersfield, Calif., area. It’s a bit like the Texas Panhandle in this sense: They pump oil there, cultivate a lot of farmland, the wind blows a lot and its residents are fairly conservative. One more thing: the region has a large and growing Hispanic population.

And that is why Majority Leader McCarthy is facing a bit of a test as he tries to manage one key issue: immigration reform.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/inside-the-house-gop-leadership-shake-up-108103.html?hp=l7

The tea party wing of the lawmakers he leads in the House don’t favor the kind of comprehensive reform that many Democrats and Republicans want. It’s the kind of reform that former leader Eric Cantor has supported — and which might have cost him his House seat in that stunning GOP primary upset in Virginia earlier this month.

McCarthy, though, doesn’t work for the tea party wing of his party in the House. He works for the folks back home. His congressional district is about 36 percent Hispanic. My hunch is that many of them have relatives who are non-citizens living in the United States. They want their immigrant kin to be able to enjoy the fruits of citizenship.

They vote and, thus, could apply pressure to Leader McCarthy as he seeks to manage the unwieldy wing of his fractious Republican congressional caucus.

So, the new leader well might be asking himself: For whom do I work?

He knows the answer, and it isn’t the Republican Party zealots in Washington, D.C.