To say that the 109th Congress left not with a bang but a whimper would be an insult to whimperers everywhere. This lame-duck session was truly lame--a fitting punctuation point for the entire Congress, and the new fools' gold standard for the term "do-nothing Congress."

Resident Scholar Norman J. Ornstein

This year, the House, even including the lame duck, had barely 70 full days in session, if you don't count the often phony days that had no votes before 6:30 p.m. The only good news here is that perhaps the much-maligned 80th Congress, which after all passed the Marshall Plan among other things, will no longer be saddled with that misleading moniker.

This was a Congress that truly defined the "Broken Branch," which of course is the title of a book about Congress. (As the holiday season moves into full swing, keep that in mind; it makes a great gift.) In the 109th, we saw the continued disdain for the regular order. Votes often extended beyond their expected and designated limits. Points of order were waived without regard for parliamentary propriety. Debates were squashed. And 1,000-page bills were brought to votes without any opportunity for Members to read or digest them.

We saw the continuing erosion of the deliberative process, with few extended debates in committees or subcommittees or on the House or Senate floor about big issues. There were few examples of bills that were constructed after lengthy, probing hearings and similarly probing markups. We waited for any real signs of oversight--and still are waiting, with a couple of notable exceptions centered mostly on Reps. Tom Davis (R-Va.) and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) on the Government Reform Committee as well as an occasional paroxysm from the Senate Armed Services Committee over Iraq. We saw no convincing sign of a Congress willing to stand up to the executive branch's efforts to expand its power. And, of course, we saw too much of a continuing corrosive divide between the parties.

There are some signs that the 110th will be different. Those signs begin with the verbal pledges of the new leaders in the majority, and their knowledge that they will be held to the standards they have set. The conversations I have had with leaders suggest that, at least in the House, they are serious about crafting a new and credible ethics process--an absolute necessity to change the image and reality of a corrupt Congress and dysfunctional process.

Let me repeat here one suggestion I made in a column in October: The boldest move incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) could make to underscore her commitment to create the most ethical Congress in history would be to name outgoing Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.) to head a "council of elders" that functions as an independent adjunct to the ethics committee. Imagine the public and press reaction if the Democratic Speaker picked a conservative Republican for that post--one who would do the job prudently and fairly, with no partisan or ideological axe to grind, and no larger ambition to leave his conduct open to question.

The schedule changes pledged by incoming House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) are truly breaths of fresh air and the key to many of the other changes that are needed. We simply can't have a reasonable legislative process when the average work week in Washington is a day and a half. And frankly, it is much harder to have a civil society on Capitol Hill when most lawmakers keep their families at home, hardly see their colleagues except during their frenetic abbreviated work weeks and don't connect with them as people. I would love to see a renewed effort to get a reasonable housing allowance for Members who move their families to Washington, D.C., to make the costs of keeping two residences more tolerable.

I won't get into a laundry list of specific reforms and changes that we need to return to a functional and functioning Congress; readers can find that in "Restoring Order," the report that Tom Mann of Brookings Institution and I did under the auspices of the Reform Institute. (It's available on their Web site, www.reforminstitute.org.) But I do want to mention a couple of areas the new leaders should deal with to make the change from the past more complete.

First and foremost, we need to restore, or develop, real debate within both the House and Senate. This country is at a crossroads in a host of important areas, domestic and international. The public would be well served to have a Congress that actually debated these issues, from what to do about Americans who lack health insurance to what to do about globalization--not to mention grappling with the challenges in Iraq, Russia, North Korea and Afghanistan. This can and should mean the return of some formal, prime-time Oxford-style debates on the House and Senate floors. But it also means an overhaul of debate procedures on bills on the floor.

The way the House leaders have proposed handling the ethics and lobbying reform issues--taking them up one by one, having real, extended discussions and having real votes on amendments--may be a good template here. When significant bills come up, the debate should be structured around the idea that this is a way to discuss really important issues for the public and for the Members. It also should involve a commitment on the part of both parties to do this on the square--no (or at least very few) "gotcha" amendments, designed to frame 30-second attack ads in the next campaign, as well as real opportunities for rank-and-file Members in both parties to have amendments considered in committee and on the floor.

Second, the Speaker and the Majority Leader should show their commitment to a new era of majority/minority relations by meeting on a regular basis, not just with their minority leadership counterparts, but with groups of Republican rank-and-filers. It would be wise for the Speaker to assemble a group of 10 or so House Republicans, both staunch conservatives and moderates, and long-serving incumbents and newcomers, and meet with them every six weeks or so for an off-the-record, unvarnished discussion. It would address how they are being treated in committee, how they think the House is operating and the like. The simple commitment to meet and obtain feedback would be worth a lot--and the feedback might lead to constructive adjustments that make the House work better.

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI.