Rich Lowry asks that question in his column at townhall.com.
If Democrats want to be faster than Gingrich, they don't want to be as grandiose. This is shrewd. Gingrich mistakenly thought he could govern the country from the speaker's chair and disastrously overreached as a consequence. Nancy Pelosi's only early overreaching will be exhausting all of her party's popular, largely symbolic measures in a matter of days. What will Democrats do to fill the countless other hours before their term is done?
What indeed? Lowry points out that reforming lobbyist rules is an important and worthy goal, but we'll have to see if these are real reforms (which will bite Democrats as well as Republicans) or more of the sort of window-dressing we've seen in reform efforts of the past.
The problem for Democrats is that they ran on little ("we aren't Republicans" basically), and they were largely elected for what they aren't (Republicans). That's a hard platform on which to accomplish much.
The Democratic substance is vanishingly thin. They will raise the minimum wage, but 29 states already have a minimum wage that's higher than the federal rate. The effect of the hike mainly will be to give a small boost to the wage of teenagers working summers or after school. FDR would yawn.
On prescription drugs, Democrats promised to have the government negotiate for lower drug prices. But the case for major overhaul of the Medicare prescription-drug program has weakened, as the program has proven reasonably popular with seniors and cheaper than expected. Democrats simply might give the Bush administration the authority to negotiate lower prices, which would be meaningless because the administration opposes such negotiations as de facto price controls.
Democrats already have abandoned their promise to immediately implement all the remaining recommendations of the 9/11 Commission because some would require solving nettlesome jurisdictional issues in Congress. They will pass federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but might not be able to override a presidential veto. They want to cut interest rates on student loans, but that can be expensive at a time when they also want to impose pay-as-you-go rules mandating that new spending has to be paid for with tax increases or spending cuts.
An important political consequence of the Democratic takeover is that it liberates Republicans from the compulsion they had felt to abandon their principles in order to try to protect their majority. As Nancy Pelosi took the speaker's gavel, President Bush sounded the sort of clarion calls on fiscal responsibility --endorsing a balanced budget in five years -- and earmark reform that he never did when free-spending, earmarking Republicans controlled the Hill. He hopes to box in Democrats with their own anti-deficit rhetoric and force them either to forgo major new spending or embrace politically perilous tax increases.
You can already hear the whining from the left about Republican smugness in the minority, but it's really easy to carp and complain when you don't have to do anything (other than obstruct, I mean). That's what the Democrats have done, more or less, for the last four years and it is what Republicans did prior to taking control of the House in 1994.
Once the dust settles and the gimmick of the first 100 hours is gone, it could be a long two years for Democrats.
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