By Michael Teitelbaum, CQ Staff

With two big groups of House freshmen on the Hill this week — the ones just finishing their first term and the ones just elected — it’s a good time to look back to a time when a really big group of freshmen arrived in town.

Before Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., had her class of 2006 “majority makers,” former Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga. (1979-99) had a big group of newcomers who fueled a Republican revolution: the 73- member Class of 1994, elected under the promises that were marketed as a “Contract with America.”

Seven of them either retired this year or lost their re-election efforts, so come January, there will be 15 of them returning to the House for the 111th Congress. Seven more of that group of shake-up-Washington outsiders from 1994 have become members of the Senate.

Remaining members of that class say they’ve learned a lot in the years since their arrival in Washington changed the character of Capitol Hill and changed the relationship between the legislative branch and the first-term presidency of then-President Bill Clinton.

Tennessee Rep. Zach Wamp goes back to 2003 when talking about hard lessons learned.

It was midway through the first term of President Bush, and members of the Class of ’94, like other Republicans in Congress, were torn. They wanted to support the president of their own party but many of them were reluctant to set up a voluntary Medicare prescription drug program (PL 108-173) and resentful of efforts by their own party leaders to push them in a direction they didn’t want to go.

“We lost our soul on that vote,” Wamp said. “It was the moment that our leaders put re-elections above principles.”

Rep. Todd Tiahrt , R-Kan., said he wishes there had been some more institutional pressure. The legislative branch has the power to exert oversight of the executive branch and scrutinize the way the government is being run, but there was some reluctance to do that too aggressively, he said, using hearings on the mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2005 as an example. Congress spotlighted problems in those hearings but did not follow up with action “and look where we ended up,” Tiahrt said.

Another House Republican first elected in 1994, Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, said that caucus thrived under divided government but in many ways besides that Medicare vote withered under the party’s unified control.

Where Are They Now? Click here for interactive picture gallery

“The House leadership should have told Bush, We’re not going to give you a blank check,” he said. “But they gave him one anyway.

“If we had divided government in 2001 with a new president, we would have been more true to our positions than we did with a president of our own party.”

A ’94 classmate, GOP Rep. Steven C. LaTourette of Ohio, analyzes the decline of the House wing of their party somewhat differently.