Quotes of the Day

Joe Walsh didn't go to Washington to make friends. "I came here ready to go to war," says Walsh, a Republican freshman from Chicago's suburbs. "The political powers will always try to get you to compromise your beliefs for the good of the team," he says, sitting in his congressional office near a quilt inscribed with the Constitution's preamble and the leather sofa that doubles as his bed. "The people didn't send me here to compromise."

Humility was once a hallmark of House newcomers, who were greeted with backwater committee assignments and indifference from their elders. Former House Speaker Tip O'Neill called newbies "bed wetters"; Sam Rayburn advised his freshmen that the way to "get along" was to "go along." But that adage assumed the rookies wanted to rise to power in the chamber. At least some of the 87-member House Republican freshman class of 2010 seem more interested in burning it down.

But while revolutionary rhetoric propelled many of the freshmen to Washington, some believe their success will depend on making peace. "We need to get back to where we can talk about compromise," says Adam Kinzinger, an Air National Guard pilot who represents a district southwest of Chicago. "It's a word that people have kind of demonized." For Republican newcomers, the cost-cutting fervor of the party's conservative base comes with risks, not least that voters who say they're ready for austerity will bristle when asked to relinquish programs and subsidies to which they've grown accustomed.

Like Walsh, Kinzinger unseated a Democrat in a district President Obama won in 2008. They're both eager to rein in spending and roll back the reach of government. But they have very different philosophies about how to take on the Democratic Senate and the Obama White House in the months to come.

For his part, Walsh relishes the challenge. "This will be a tension throughout the next two years among Republicans. I think it's healthy. This city ain't never seen something like this freshman class."

A Delicate Balance
On a chilly February afternoon, Kinzinger is standing in the Bloomington, Ill., headquarters of State Farm Insurance, holding a town hall with employees and executives in a dreary auditorium with industrial lighting and gray-carpeted walls. Kinzinger is 33 and looks younger. He begins by taking his audience on a somber tour of the nation's balance sheet: the $14 trillion national debt, the bloated deficit, 9% unemployment, a busted entitlement system. It's an appeal to the head more than the heart, a pitch that preps his audience for the pain he'll be delivering. "Cutting spending is not a decision I want to make," he says. "But we are going to ask you to make sacrifices."

Sacrifice is never an easy sell in politics, and while the reception is mostly positive when Kinzinger opens the floor for questions, the anxiety spills out. Some people are concerned that the new Republican majority is cutting too much too fast. Referring to Kinzinger's talk of rooting out Medicare fraud, one man asks whether federal budget cuts will undermine the cause. Kinzinger says employees will have to "be more effective," prompting a derisive laugh from his interrogator. Others demand to know why Kinzinger hasn't cut more; one challenges him to defend his recent vote to continue production of an expensive fighter-jet engine that the House successfully snipped. Another asks whether Kinzinger supports ending federal farm subsidies — a loaded question in a rural district that relies on agricultural largesse. Kinzinger dodges that one. Afterward, the questioner says he opposes farm subsidies but knows why the Congressman ducked the issue. "For this district, he said what he had to say."

Not that Kinzinger is a shrinking violet. As a student at Illinois State University, he ousted an incumbent Democrat on the county board. In the Air Force, he flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and also risked his life on a Milwaukee street in 2006 when he disarmed a man trying to stab a young woman to death.

Yet while Kinzinger rode to Congress on the Tea Party wave, his politics are nuanced. He is a solid conservative on taxes, defense and social issues. But as the son of a teacher, he also believes Washington has a role to play in education. He supported Congress's December extension of unemployment benefits. Since his January swearing-in, he has backed several programs House conservatives wanted to chop, including Amtrak subsidies and home-heating assistance for the poor. The conservative political group Heritage Action for America cites him as one of the six Republican freshmen least committed to cutting spending. Before he had cast a vote, a Tea Party organization released his personal contact information and urged members to warn him that they "won't tolerate politics as usual." And even as he watches his right flank, Kinzinger must be wary of his left one. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently began conducting automated phone calls in his district, criticizing Kinzinger's vote to cut housing aid for homeless veterans. "Nobody's going to be happy," Kinzinger says. "I think it's one of the hardest times in the country's history to be a Congressman."

That may help to explain why Kinzinger is selling comity at a moment when the market for confrontation runs hot, and why he's eager to avoid the budget brinkmanship that could lead to a repeat of the shutdowns of 1995 and '96. "We're determined to keep the government open," he says. "I hope that in the long run we can find areas of common ground."

Slashing and Burning
For Joe Walsh, the calculation is simpler. "Getting re-elected in two years is not a priority," he says. Walsh, 49, has vowed to serve a maximum of three terms, and he was never supposed to be in Washington in the first place. An upbeat venture capitalist, Walsh was considered such a long shot to win his district that the national party barely bothered investing money in his campaign. He ran an unpolished race marred by reports that his condo had fallen into foreclosure. But Walsh channeled the national mood — "I've had enough!" his website proclaimed — and eked out a victory by 290 votes.

Walsh reveres the framers, drops phrases like "Madison and the boys" and envisions himself as a "radically different" kind of Representative. "People come here because it's comfortable, and you're patted on the butt all the time and you feel like a king," he says. As a gesture of abstemiousness, he has declined the cushy health benefits granted to members of Congress, and he is among more than a dozen GOP freshmen who sleep in their offices. Many freshmen frame their zeal for cost cutting as an approach guided by morality, not partisanship. "We should be the conscience of the conference," says Representative James Lankford of Oklahoma, a former Christian-summer-camp director. "We are not the anti-Obama class or the Tea Party class we're described as," says Representative Austin Scott of Georgia, whose peers elected him freshman-class president. "What we are is committed to the next generation."

From the beginning, many of the House's conservative newcomers were wary of leaders like Speaker John Boehner, whom they saw as part of Washington's culture of deal cutting. And while they praise Boehner's hands-off style, freshmen suspicious that party leaders "might have been trying to co-opt us," as one puts it, recently led the class to recommit to a weekly meeting that had begun falling victim to hectic schedules.

When Republican House leaders presented a budget plan that would have cut $32 billion in seven months — a deep whack, but less than the GOP had pledged — it spurred rumblings of a freshman revolt. So Boehner bowed to their demands and boosted the figure to $61 billion. Democrats say that figure requires unacceptable cuts in vital programs and have vowed to reject it, but the skirmish cemented the group's clout. "If we stick together on everything," Walsh says, "our leadership is screwed."

With the government set to run out of money on March 4, House Republicans and Senate Democrats began to look for a short-term solution. Boehner's refusal to offer a temporary extension of current spending levels was backed by the freshmen, who insisted they would not accept any measure without a down payment on the deeper cuts to come. "I will say no and I will shut down government," Walsh vowed to a group of his constituents in late February. Democrats caved, but the next battle already looms as the rebels make noises about voting down an increase in the federal debt limit this spring, even if it means the U.S. defaults on obligations to its creditors. Walsh estimates 20 to 25 freshmen believe, as he does, that the nation's fiscal woes are "so serious that this country needs to crash."

For all their bluster about changing Washington, in some ways these freshmen are old news. In 1994, the GOP snatched back the House after 40 years in the minority, led by 73 rookies with a comparable set of hopes and hang-ups. "It's eerie how many similarities there are," says Linda Killian, whose book The Freshmen follows the '94 class through the 104th Congress. That group misinterpreted the scope of its mandate. Led by Newt Gingrich, they shut down the government over a budget impasse. But voters overwhelmingly sided with Bill Clinton when they went to the polls. Even the most conservative of the '94 group, Killian recalls, "only stayed true believers for about a year. Then the shutdown happened, and the realities hit."

Perhaps that's why some in the class of 2010, mindful of their predecessors' missteps, are ready to write a different ending. "None of us want to see the government shut down," Kinzinger says. "It's not good for us, and it's not good for the American people."

And yet for some compromise remains a dirty word. "I'm ready to make those tough votes," Walsh says. "I'm pretty certain the American people are with us."

• Alex Altman