The gavel came down yesterday on the 109th Congress, and the end of an era of Republican control that lasted 12 years.

Demoralized Republicans adjourned the 109th Congress at 5 a.m. yesterday with a near-empty Capitol, closing the door on a dozen years of nearly unbroken GOP control by spending more time in the final days lamenting their failures — to rein in government, tame the deficit and temper their own lust for power — than reliving their successes.

Still reeling from their electoral defeat Nov. 7, Republicans capped an era of conservative ascendance with the passage of business tax break extensions, a package of trade measures, and legislation to stave off physician-payment cuts they once trumpeted in their budget-cutting drive.

While GOP leaders touted their handiwork, it was a far cry from 12 years ago when the Republicans swept to power with the zeal of self-described revolutionaries and a mission to shrink the size of government, limit its reach, strengthen the nation’s security and end an era of a privileged, imperial Congress.

A far cry indeed, as some Republicans are finally starting to realize:

“You know, the American people took the reins of government away from the Republican Party . . . in this last election. They did so, I think, in large part because they were tired of our hypocrisy,” fumed Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) from the Senate floor. “Our leadership and some of our members grew arrogant in their own power, and with arrogance comes corruption,” said Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), a member of the class of 1994.

“We came to change Washington, and Washington changed us,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Actually, except for the past six years, when the GOP controlled both the Congress and the White House, there was actually some good done:

Combing through the fine print of the 1994 “Contract With America” campaign manifesto, one finds goals that Americans now largely take for granted. Congressional committee chairmen, who once built empires from inviolable perches, are now term limited. The contract anticipated a lucrative tax credit for each child, the end of a tax penalty on marriage, federal incentives for adoption, the easing of limits on the amount seniors could earn and still receive their Social Security benefits and some curbs on civil litigation. The overriding political fear of tax increases, still evident as Democrats move to resume control, can be seen as a conservative victory, as can a federal minimum wage that has grown increasingly irrelevant after nearly a decade without change.

That is something to be proud of, but when you compare it to what hasn’t been accomplished, it comes up lacking:

Yet measured against the ambitions of 1994, not much has changed. The House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee might be no more, but the departments of commerce, education and energy, once slated for the chopping block, are still very much alive, as are the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Compared with the size of the economy, government discretionary spending has grown. The vision of a term-limited Congress of everymen, rotating through Washington after short stints, has all but vanished. And government programs such as Medicare and federal education bureaucracies are larger and more pervasive.

“It’s a mixed bag,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), the architect of the 1994 revolution. “In a three-year period, we changed things fairly dramatically. We, candidly, then failed.”

So does this mean that a political agenda devoted to limiting and even reducing the size of government is inherently destined to be co-opted by the very government it seeks to reduce ? For several reasons, I don’t think so.

First, the Republicans in Congress let themselves get distracted from the Contract With America fairly quickly. The most prominent example of this came when more than two years in the late `90′s were taken up by the attempted impeachment of Bill Clinton. Virtually from the time the Articles of Impeachment were drawn up, it was clear that there would never be enough votes in the Senate to convict and remove the the President. And the public never really supported the impeachment. Viewed from this perspective, wasting nearly two years of legislative time was a huge mistake that accomplished nothing in the end.

Second, the Republicans let their opponents define the agenda. Whether it was images of starving children, or the way that Gingrich and the GOP leadership let themselves be played by the Clinton Administration during the budget showdown that resulted in the closing of the Federal Government (during which time, interestingly enough, President Clinton first met an intern named Monica Lewinsky), the GOP kept losing the public relations battle and didn’t seem to understand that they were losing.

The final factor that contributed to the failure of the `94 Republican revolution was the election of George W. Bush. Yes, he’s a Republican, but it was clear from the beginning that he was not a true believer when it came to the limited government philosophy that the Contract with America embodies. Over the past six years, Bush has governed more like Richard Nixon, who was far from being a small-government conservative, than Ronald Reagan, and the GOP has gone right along with him.

Given, the strikes against them, then, perhaps it’s amazing that the GOP accomplished anything at all.