Ambitious Goals Will Test GOP's New Muscle

Emboldened Republicans have strengthened the hand of their conservative leadership and have brought moderate colleagues to heel. In last week's postelection session of Congress, they jammed an antiabortion rider into the last budget bill of the year.

And Republican leaders, apparently undeterred by the fact that they still will have a relatively narrow majority when the new Congress opens in January, embraced President Bush's ambitious second-term agenda of overhauling Social Security and the tax code.

"My fellow conservatives, we have waited our entire lives for the chance the American people have given us in the next two years," a triumphant House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said in a recent speech to a conservative group. "I pledge to each and every one of you, we will seize it."

Congress' weeklong lame-duck session also showed Bush that the conservative exuberance unleashed by GOP gains may not always be directed behind his agenda. A group of senior House Republicans defied direct lobbying from Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and blocked a vote on an intelligence reform bill sought by the White House.

The rebuff signaled that, with Bush's reelection behind him, the party unity he commanded in Congress may be hard to maintain as lawmakers start becoming more forthright about their differences on government spending, policy in Iraq and other issues on which dissent has been kept largely behind closed doors.

In flexing their muscles, congressional Republicans are taking a cue from Bush, who has seemed more self-confident than ever in the wake of his reelection. He has moved aggressively to consolidate his power and pack his Cabinet with unwavering loyalists.

A key question is whether Bush and his expanded Republican majorities will overreach their mandate. Democrats blazed that path in 1992, when President Clinton was elected with a Democrat-controlled Congress -- and failed spectacularly to overhaul the healthcare system.

Republicans fell into the same trap when they took control of Congress in the 1994 elections for the first time in 40 years. They came to power with conservative guns blazing; a year later they took a political drubbing for a budget fight with Clinton that temporarily shut down part of the government. Many Republicans are eager to avoid that kind of mistake.