WASHINGTON (By Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post) November 12, 2006 — Democrats preparing to take control of Congress for the first time in more than a decade are looking to the Republican revolution of 1995 as an object lesson of what to emulate and what to avoid. They hope to match the legislative energy of the Newt Gingrich era while avoiding at all costs the partisan pitfalls that eventually soured voters on the GOP.

The Democratic Party of 2007 will look significantly different from the party that was swept from power 12 years ago. The old-guard liberals and union Democrats in control then are losing power to a new generation of moderates with more temperate legislative ambitions.

Democrats last week picked up six seats in the Senate and at least 28 seats in the House en route to victory. Eleven of those House districts were solidly Republican in the 2004 presidential election, while new Democratic senators from Montana, Missouri, Virginia and Ohio will have to be mindful of their traditionally Republican constituents.

Led by a feisty Nevada senator and the first woman in history to claim the House speaker's post, the long-banished Democrats hope to prove their bona fides as lawmakers and challenge a president from the other party to accept their agenda, a game plan taken straight from the Gingrich era's "Contract with America."

They also intend to challenge President Bush to change course in Iraq and consider their demands for a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops.

But Democrats say they will avoid the overreaching, arrogance and rancorous partisanship that left them virtually powerless on Capitol Hill.

Democratic leaders vowed last week to pass major ethics reforms early in the new 110th Congress, and to offer Republicans seats at the negotiating table and ample opportunities to amend bills on the floor, opportunities that were denied their party.

"What they did was very effective in pulling up all the ladders for any other party to gain the majority," incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said last week of the Gingrich revolutionaries.

"They just shut the doors to debate on the floor, to amendments coming, to even how special order (speeches) were conducted. Everything they were effective in using to gain the majority they shut down.

"We're going to do the opposite," she pledged.

"This country has spoken loudly and clearly," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., slated to become the new Senate majority leader in January, told a Capitol Hill rally last week.

"There must be a change of direction in Iraq. We have to have results in doing something to make health care more affordable and more available. We have to do something to create energy independence."

Democratic leaders have put forward an ambitious opening salvo for January, a 100-hour legislative blitz that includes raising the minimum wage, boosting alternative-energy research and repealing tax breaks for oil companies. They also want to beef up seaport screening, expand college tuition assistance, boost federal stem-cell research and allow the government to negotiate lower drug prices under Medicare.

Beyond those tasks, House Democrats hope to approve rules changes to limit the influence of lobbyists, offer minority Republicans more input on legislation, curb home-state pet projects in spending bills and, possibly, give the District of Columbia voting rights on the House floor.

But once the 100 hours or so pass, pressure will mount on Democrats to confront what many liberals see as the misdeeds of Bush and the Republican Party.

The party's base is clamoring for Democrats to repeal tax cuts skewed to the affluent, to revisit the new law authorizing military tribunals for terrorism suspects and to investigate the run-up to the Iraq invasion.

To some Democrats, that raises memories of the aggressive, and ultimately self-destructive, stance that House Republicans took when they stormed to power in the 1994 election and later voted to impeach President Bill Clinton, only to see Clinton acquitted in the Senate.

"They're under great pressure to placate the base, to be hard-line and in some ways to pay back the Republicans," said former Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the last Democratic Senate majority leader.

"But they're also under tremendous pressure to produce and show they can govern. Finding the balance, that's going to be the big challenge."

"It's one thing to oppose and obstruct. It's another to try to govern and legislate," said Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, a moderate Republican who is urging bipartisan cooperation. "How they set in gear the motions for governing and legislating will clearly set the tone for the duration."

The ranks of the new Democratic leadership will include Reid, who once called Bush a "loser" and a "liar"; Pelosi, who bitterly remembers the power shift to the Republicans; and a new Democratic Caucus chairman, Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, who confronted Gingrich's revolution as an aide in the Clinton White House.

"Newt ran in and said, I'm basically the prime minister,' " Emanuel recalled.

"We didn't do that. Nancy said we won an election. The president won an election. We have to respect the results of both 2004 and 2006."

Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, agreed.

"We should always be mindful that there was a little bit of God and a lot of bit of luck here. A 4,000-vote shift and we would have four new senators, not the U.S. Senate."

If all voters see is interest-group politics and "a lot of shouting," Schumer added, "Our victory could be ephemeral ... more ephemeral than Gingrich's one was. Everyone has to be cognizant of the fact that keeping the majority helps all of us achieve far more of our goals than if we undermine it."

But there are limits to such sentiments. In the 1990s, Republicans shifted the number of committee seats allotted to the majority and minority parties to virtually ensure that no cross-party collaboration would be needed to draft and pass legislation. When asked whether she might change those ratios as a goodwill gesture, Pelosi last week said, "I don't see a scenario where there is going to be much appetite for that."

And regardless of leaders' intent, conservative Democrats worry that Democratic old bulls, returning to chair committees after so long in the minority, could drive a partisan agenda. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., at the helm of the education panel, and Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, may be too quick to pick fights before Democrats can cement their gains.