WASHINGTON -- OK, America. The Republicans are ready to give you what they think you want: lower taxes, smaller government, regulators off your back. The IRS, social spending and smoking bans are out. Tax deductions, welfare reform and school prayer are in.
As the GOP takes control of Congress for the first time in four decades, the new conservative agenda its candidates carried into election battle is about to be translated into a form that can become law.
Even President Clinton sounds agreeable to parts of the Republican agenda. With some black humor arising from the ashes of Tuesday's apparent repudiation of his presidency, Mr. Clinton joked: "Their term-limits proposal is looking better to me every day."
But now, face-to-face with their enormous task, the Republican leaders are already lowering expectations about how quickly they can achieve results.
"These are real changes; it's going to be hard to do," said Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the soon-to-be speaker of the House who plans to keep his 434 colleagues in session six days a week.
Standing in the Republicans' way are two major obstacles: Democratic filibusters in the Senate, where the GOP majority is seven votes short of the minimum needed to cut off debate.
And political tensions within their own party that might destroy unity on the tough decisions.
The internal disputes may be hardest to overcome.
"This is a great opportunity for Republicans, but they are going to have to take some risks," said former Sen. Warren B. Rudman, the New Hampshire Republican who in 1992 quit Congress in disgust at its refusal to balance the bloated federal budget.
"If they try to play it safe, they'll lose it, and the voters will start seeking a third party." Taking risks, said Mr. Rudman, means more than making cosmetic changes.
And it's not enough, he said, merely to avoid the cowardly act of cutting taxes without a spending cut to match.
It means taking on the special interests that have been paying "protection money" to the Democrats for years in the form of campaign contributions, and shrinking government by getting rid benefits for rich people who don't need them, said David Keating, executive director of the National Taxpayers Union.
Edward Crane, president of the conservative Cato Institute, is confident that the Republican Congress will hasten the shrinking of the federal government.
But he added, "It's not at all clear . . . how far the [Republicans] are willing to go to turn things around."
Intraparty Republican battles are expected over seemingly easily settled problems, such as slashing crop subsidies for wealthy farmers.
And the chairman-to-be of the powerful House Ways and Means committee, Rep. Bill Archer of Texas, pledged last week to eliminate the taxes the Democrats imposed last year on Social Security recipients with substantial outside incomes.
Too much for Gingrich
In fact, Mr. Archer wants to do the unimaginable: Do away with the income tax entirely, and replace it with a national sales tax. That was too much even for Mr. Gingrich.
"I've always told people my friends are more conservative than I am," quipped Mr. Gingrich, who has long been the darling of the far right.
Early indications suggest that the Republicans on Capitol Hill will be led by a triumvirate of Mr. Gingrich, Bob Dole of Kansas, who will become Senate majority leader, and Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas.
Mr. Gramm, who is leaving the job of Republican Senate Campaign Committee chairman, has no official portfolio, except that he and Mr. Dole are both expected to seek the party's presidential nomination in 1996.
Over the past two years, that competition has had the effect of pulling Mr. Dole -- a centrist and compromiser at heart -- closer to the far right of his party, where Mr. Gramm sits as anchor.
Dole dislikes both men
Mr. Dole doesn't care much for Mr. Gramm or Mr. Gingrich and appears far less ready than they are to commit his party to specific actions. The obvious friction among them poses a threat to the Republicans' legislative agenda.
"I think we have to come together and try to reach some consensus and not be going off in too many directions," Mr. Dole said last week in a tart reference to Mr. Gramm's latest round of pronouncements.
Republican leaders hope to minimize early internal squabbles by XTC avoiding the social issues that divide them, such as abortion rights and gun control.
Some individual Republicans are expected to try to tighten abortion restrictions and to lift the new ban on most assault weapons. But those efforts won't be promoted by the party leadership, GOP staffers say.
The starting point for action in the House will be the "Contract with America" that Mr. Gingrich devised for Republican candidates to use as a campaign platform.
The speaker-to-be has already moved to implement the congressional reforms he promised to take up on Jan. 4, the first day of the new session.
Committees and subcommittees are being combined and streamlined. The Democrats are losing half their current staff members, to achieve an overall staff reduction of one-third.
In their organizing caucus next month, Republicans will vote on limiting the terms for committee chairmen, which could be painful after being out of power for 40 years.
Discrimination laws
The first-day agenda also includes a bill that would apply to Congress the federal personnel and anti-discrimination laws already imposed on the rest of the country.
The measure passed the House this year but was killed in the Senate by a Republican filibuster aimed at blocking anything for which the Democrats could take credit.
Mr. Gingrich has promised that a more ambitious package of legislation will be voted on during the first 100 days of the new session, including constitutional amendments to require a balanced federal budget and to impose term limits on Congress.
Mr. Dole has promised to try to bring any parts of the package that pass the House up for a vote in the Senate.
But the Democrats may choose to filibuster several of the proposals, including a measure to grant the president power to veto individual items in a spending bill.
Sharp new limits on welfare benefits will also begin moving early through the House, Mr. Gingrich says. Legislation to discourage frivolous lawsuits will follow. A first phase of reforms in the health insurance industry is also likely to be attempted.
Efforts to reduce or eliminate government regulation will be waged on a committee-by-committee basis.
Rep. Thomas J. Bliley Jr., a Richmond Republican with close ties to cigarette manufacturers, got off to a fast start last week when he announced that his Energy and Commerce Committee would drop its "vendetta" against the tobacco industry once he becomes chairman.
Much of the next year is likely to be devoted, however, to shaping the Republican's budget and tax package, which will contrast sharply with Mr. Clinton's initiative last year that reduced the deficit partly by increasing taxes on the wealthy.
Democrats and other critics have ridiculed the GOP promise to increase military spending, cut taxes and still balance the federal budget, which has a deficit of more than $200 billion.
Mr. Archer last week outlined a $190 billion package of tax cuts, including incentives for savings and investment, that would primarily benefit businesses and affluent Americans and would provide a $500 per child tax credit for the middle class.
Nothing to offset cuts
He did not specify how the income tax losses would be offset to avoid increasing the deficit. Many Republicans argue that business tax cuts actually raise government revenue by spurring economic growth.
Republican leaders, however, insist that they are more than eager to make the spending cuts necessary to offset their tax cuts.
"We're going to cut spending -- there's no doubt about it," said Ed Gillespie, a spokesman for Rep. Dick Armey of Texas, who will become House majority leader. "We'll just assume those tax cuts won't produce any new revenue, and when it comes in five years from now, it will be a pleasant surprise."
Finding cuts difficult
Finding those cuts will be difficult, because the Republicans have promised to increase defense spending and to leave the Social Security program -- with its automatic annual increases even for the richest Americans -- untouched.
Republican leaders have targeted housing, health, welfare and educations programs to take hits.
Mr. Gingrich said it was time to "take a look at" the Head Start early learning program for disadvantaged youths, one of the few federal programs considered by both parties to have been an unqualified success. But no specifics have been put forward yet.
For all its anguish over the Democratic losses in Congress, the White House is taking some pleasure at watching the newly empowered Republicans struggle to produce solutions instead of just criticism.
"I think it is incumbent on the Republicans at this point to show how they plan to move forward, how they plan to govern and how seriously they take the responsibility that comes with that," said Dee Dee Myers, the White House spokeswoman.