Democrats took control of Congress this week with promises of fiscal discipline, bipartisanship and help for middle-class America. They can't keep them all

NANCY PELOSI made history this week, and she made sure Americans noticed. The congresswoman from San Francisco, who became the country's first female speaker of the House of Representatives on January 4th, planned to celebrate her swearing-in with three days of carefully choreographed festivities, including a concert, a “people's” reception on Capitol Hill and a trip to her native Baltimore, where a street is to be named after her.

The razzmatazz was designed to convince Americans that Ms Pelosi is not the wacky west-coast left-winger of Republican caricature, but a Catholic mother of five from modest origins in an industrial town. And, more important, that she is a responsible leader who intends to get things done. Harry Reid, the Senate's new majority leader, took over with less fanfare but a similar commitment to action.

The initial to-do list is well known. For months, Democrats have proclaimed their priorities, dubbed “Six for 06”. Ms Pelosi has promised to pass them within the first 100 hours of the congressional session. Top of the agenda is ethics reform, in particular banning lawmakers from taking gifts or free trips from lobbyists, followed by the creation of new budget rules.

The first full-scale bill will be to implement the homeland security improvements recommended by the 9/11 Commission. That is to be followed by legislation to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour, boost embryonic stem-cell research, encourage the government to negotiate with drug companies for lower prices in the Medicare prescription-drug plan, cut the interest rate on student loans, roll back tax subsidies for oil firms and expand incentives to save.

These priorities are less a coherent agenda than a grab-bag of popular initiatives. But they have a clear political logic. Democrats want to show, quickly, that they are the party of clean, responsible and effective government, unlike the sleazy, partisan and reckless Republicans. President Bush tried to climb on the bandwagon this week, echoing Democratic calls for a balanced budget by 2012.

Unfortunately, the tensions between the Democrats' broader promises are already becoming obvious. The pledge to be bipartisan is being eclipsed by the desire to act quickly. House Democratic leaders have threatened to limit congressional debate on their Six for 06 priorities, exactly the tactics Ms Pelosi and her colleagues deplored when Republicans used them.

The toughest choices involve the budget. Democrats will be forced to decide between their promises to help middle-class Americans and their commitment to fiscal prudence. So far, the focus has been on fiscal discipline. Even before formally taking over, the Democrats in charge of spending bills in both the House and Senate have made some sensible decisions. The first concerns the unfinished 2007 budget. Technically, Congress ought long ago to have voted on spending bills for the fiscal year that began on October 1st 2006. Instead, the Republicans left town with only two out of 11 bills completed.

Democratic bigwigs have promised a single bill that keeps spending at last year's level. And they have pledged to strip out all “earmarks”, the tagged spending plans through which politicians direct funds to their home districts. Around 10,000 such pieces of pork, worth around $17 billion, are to be filleted out. The 2008 budget will allow earmarks, but only after new rules are put in place that will require politicians to attach their names to them.

More broadly, the Democrats seem determined to improve the budget process. They want Mr Bush to include the cost of the Iraq war in his formal budget rather than send Congress a series of “supplemental” spending bills. (The next such request, for at least $100 billion, is due in early February). Likewise, rather than passing stop-gap laws every year to prevent the Alternative Minimum Tax from ensnaring ever more middle-class Americans, Democratic tax writers want to solve the problem permanently—though they are coy about how to do so. But most important, Democrats have pledged a return to pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) budget rules.

These rules were first adopted in 1990, when America's budget deficit was almost 4% of GDP. The idea is simple. Any tax cut or expansion of a government entitlement programme, such as Medicare, has to be offset by spending cuts or tax increases elsewhere. Only a super-majority of 60 Senate votes can override the need for offsets. These rules helped shrink the deficit; but with the budget in surplus, Mr Bush's 2001 tax cut set them aside.

Strictly re-adopted, PAYGO rules would force the Democrats into a far tighter fiscal straitjacket than many realise. That is because Mr Bush's tax cuts technically expire in 2010. Under strict PAYGO rules, any extension of the Bush tax cuts—even those, such as the child-tax credit, that are popular with many middle-class Americans—would need to be paid for by spending cuts or higher taxes elsewhere.

To provide more wriggle room, some Democratic voices have suggested that the PAYGO rules should be based on a different budget baseline, perhaps one that assumes an extension of the Bush tax cuts. But a louder chorus wants the rules strictly interpreted. Many of the new lawmakers are staunch fiscal conservatives. The “Blue Dog Democrats”, a congressional group that pushes for budget discipline, now has 44 members and a powerful voice.

The tussle over PAYGO is the opening salvo of a debate that will define the new Congress. The fiscal hawks will argue that political success depends on the Democrats' fiscal responsibility, a claim the party's left is already disputing. Paul Krugman, a prominent commentator, recently argued that deficit reduction was economically sensible but politically futile. The lesson of the Bush presidency, he says, is that the fruits of fiscal prudence are squandered by subsequent irresponsibility. Democrats ought not to make the mess worse, but should not forswear their own policy priorities to improve it. With luck, the hawks will prevail.