Tuesday, January 2, 2007, 12:30 P.M.

I don't get up to the Capitol building for reporting trips much anymore, having entered that late phase of a journalist's professional life when he forgoes the mundane gathering of facts and embarks instead on flights of pure, helium-filled speculation and theorizing. My mental image of the legislative branch is thus stuck in the 1980s and early '90s. And oh what a dump it was. Forty years of uninterrupted Democratic rule had imposed a Soviet-style squalor on the physical environment. Trash piled up like tumbleweed in hallways. The cops were surly and heavily armed. Blown lightbulbs could go weeks without being replaced. Urinals gushed in sluices across tile floors. The shelves in the few convenience shops were surreal in their economic illogic: a stack of last Thursday's New York Times would sit next to several hundred pair of laces for children's shoes and eight boxes of Mentos, but if you wanted a copy of that morning's Washington Post or a double-A battery, you were out of luck.

Yet there was nowhere else, within walking distance, for a customer to go. The suffocating effects of one-party monopoly were felt most painfully in the food service. Deep within dim, airless, subterranean cafeterias, a bolus or two of mystery meat would twitch and swell in sumps of watery gravy, stirred now and then by mental defectives wearing smocks. Sometimes the servers offered cold hamburgers as an alternative, or a litter of iceberg lettuce leaves wilting under a blanket of French dressing to satisfy the occasional health-food enthusiast. You could order any kind of soft drink so long as it was Coke, which arrived in smudged glasses, fizz less. You got an ice cube if you acted nice.

Then Newt Gingrich and his Republican Revolutionaries arrived to sweep it all away.

So here I am, almost twelve years to the day since Gingrich's ascendancy, in the Food Court of the Longworth Office Building on the House side of Capitol Hill, and I am stunned by the transformation. What was once the "Longworth Cafeteria" now dazzles and gleams and pops with light and color, as though someone from the private sector, and not a patronage worker kept in place by the partisan oligopoly, had put it together in hopes of pleasing customers. And that's what happened. The Gingrichites took power and turned the food services and concession stands over to people with a profit interest. And now we have the kind of cornucopia only a free market can create; an array of foods named after places we all wish we lived in instead of Washington: A Santa Fe Chicken Special from Malibu Wraps, Carolina Brisket from Austin Blues. And the drinks! Starbucks coffee and Melon Smoothies! Endless cups of Diet Sprite--with ice! Freshets of Mr. Pibb!

It is fashionable these days, especially among disaffected conservatives, to say that the Gingrich Revolution amounted to next to nothing and ended in failure. Let those doubters come here. Let them come to the Longworth Food Court.

Yet now, undeniably, the Revolution is over. In two days Nancy Pelosi will be sworn in as speaker of the House while the Senate once again will fall into the hands of Democrats. I've decided to see as much of this spectacle as I can handle over the next couple days, and I thought I'd find the Capitol bustling in anticipation.

But it's oddly subdued. The 100 Hours of frenetic legislative activity that the new majority had promised has been delayed. Instead of celebrating Democrats, the nation is now in its seventh day of an eight-day mourning period for a Republican, Gerald Ford--roughly one day of mourning for every four months of the Ford administration. (By the same calculation, Bill Clinton's funeral will last nearly a month.) Congressmen are filtering into the food court from the memorial service up at the National Cathedral. They grab a cup of soup and take a seat at a table and thumb their BlackBerries, while their long-suffering wives chew quietly, staring into the middle distance.