Lessons Learned the Hard Way: A Personal Report.

• Author: Pitney, John J., Jr.

By Newt Gingrich. New York: HarperCollins, 256 pages, $25.00.

When they took control of Congress in 1994, Republicans promised to cut spending and transform Washington politics. Since then, they've had good days and bad days. May 22 of this year was especially rotten. On that date, the House approved a six-year, $218 billion authorization of federal highway and mass transit programs.

It's easy to measure just how bad this bill is. First, give a literal interpretation to the term "pork barrel," and reckon how much real, edible, dead-pig pork we could buy with $218 billion. Pork comes in many varieties, so which should we use? In light of how much courage lawmakers showed on this issue, the logical choice is "boneless." Supermarkets sell boneless pork for $3.39 a pound, so the highway bill equals about 64 billion pounds of pork.

That's 237 pounds for every man, woman and child in the United States. Think about that: Unless you are unusually big, your share of the highway bill exceeds your body weight.

No diabolical Democrats force-fed fat into a reluctant GOP. Republicans were the main culprits, gleefully turning from Jenny Craig into Orson Welles. They voted for the bill 143-56. Even the "revolutionary" Republicans first elected in 1994 supported it by a margin of 32-18.

Accordingly, the subtitle of The Freshmen is especially timely: "What happened to the Republican Revolution?" Linda Killian, a former reporter for Forbes, takes a long, anecdotal look at the House GOP class of 1994, focusing on a dozen members. She gives special attention to Van Hilleary of Tennessee, a good case study. Early in 1995, Hilleary helped lead the fight for congressional term limits - which became an embarrassing rout. Republicans wasted energy squabbling over several different versions, including Hilleary's proposal to let each state set its own limit. Many nominal supporters were quietly happy to see term limits die, since they now had the majority and were never serious about the idea in the first place.

At the time, the term limits vote seemed a rare exception: Before their 100-day deadline, Republicans won House passage of all the other elements of the Contract with America. By the following year, however, retreats were becoming more frequent. From a free market perspective, an especially troubling vote came when the House approved a 90-cent increase in the minimum wage. Meeting with constituents in 1995, Hilleary voiced the feelings of most people in his...