Shock waves.

• Author: Lochhead, Carolyn

Hope for limited-government hegemony on Capitol Hill.

IT IS HARDLY POSSIBLE TO OVERESTImate the magnitude of the political earthquake that shook Washington on November 8. The breathtaking Republican sweep of the House, the Senate, and the governorships of the nation's most populous states left Capitol Hill in shock and disarray, ripping through the comfortable Democratic establishment that has reigned virtually unchecked for most of the postwar era.

To a public long riveted on presidential contests, the raw power of the congressional majority is easily overlooked. Personified in one leader, the presidency seems more potent than the warring, shifting factions that are a legislature.

But the presidency is weak by design. It is Congress that writes the laws and spends the money. The president proposes. Congress acts.

Congress has had plenty of help from presidents, Democrat and Republican alike. But it is the Democratic majority in Congress that is most responsible for the creation and expansion of the modern welfare state and all its accoutrements: the crushing tax burden, the erosion of economic and personal freedom, the smothering bureaucracy, the intrusive and mindless regulation of private activity, and the entitlement dependency that saps our common community.

For the postwar generations, which include nearly everyone alive today, Democratic hegemony has been taken for granted--by the press, the public, and by both parties. The day after the election, many on both sides of the aisle were finding the new reality difficult to fathom. Nobody had experienced it for 40 years.

Not one GOP incumbent fell, even as the most revered of liberal icons toppled. Some were defeated, including House Speaker Tom Foley, Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, and Judiciary Chairman Jack Brooks. Others were pitched from their Hill thrones into minority ignominy. Grand Inquisitors like John Dingell and Henry Waxman can no longer terrorize from their committee chairmanships. Potentates who crafted every modern federal law and shaped every federal program--from welfare, to labor, to the environment, to commerce, to everything--have been stripped of the power they have wielded so freely for decades.

Democrats will lose as well the thousands of professional aides who have made careers of designing federal law and making the mischief that the rest of the country has had to cope with. The Republican sweep will decimate the institutional foundation on which the...