COLUMN ONE : Turning the House Inside Out : Utah’s Enid Waldholtz isn’t afraid to shake up the system. Some veterans have blanched, but she and the GOP’s other feisty freshmen have earned unprecedented clout.

Enid Greene Waldholtz got to Congress by running as an outsider, ousting an incumbent Democrat on a promise to clean up the mess in Washington. Now, the former Utah corporate attorney and 72 other House Republican freshmen--one of the most aggressive bands of newcomers this century--have become the very thing they scorned in the ’94 campaign:

They are powers in the nation’s capital.

But this is the revolutionized Washington of House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), a place where traditional political landmarks--including the very concept of the insider--have become unrecognizable.

And Waldholtz and company are wielding power in ways that make congressional veterans--who as freshmen learned they were to be seen but not heard--blanch. When she returns to Salt Lake City, Waldholtz wears her insider status with pride at a time when that label is considered electoral poison. But what she says to her constituents, and what she’s been trying to do in Congress, are a far cry from traditional Washington power politics.

Instead of guardians--and beneficiaries--of the status quo, the freshmen see themselves as guerrilla warriors, intent on penetrating the Capitol’s core and changing it from the inside out. With numerical strength, a rigid adherence to the “contract with America” and still-undiluted conservatism, the GOP freshmen are a powerful force in Gingrich’s Washington.

On Monday, for instance, Waldholtz gaveled the House to order and presided over the day’s legislative business for the second time this session, an unprecedented level of responsibility for a freshman.

At 36, she is the first Republican freshman in 80 years to serve on the House Rules Committee, the powerful but little-known panel that controls not only the timing but the scope of debate on every measure that goes to the floor.

A conservative so esteemed by Republicans that she has been dubbed “a Mormon Maggie Thatcher,” Waldholtz was anointed by Gingrich as a battlefield commander in his young army.

So it is that in Salt Lake City, an industrious but insular community 2,000 miles and a world away from Capitol Hill, Waldholtz cheerfully plies constituents with inside-the-Beltway tidbits: on the tax bill, on the term limits debate, on the precarious state of the balanced-budget amendment. She tosses off references to conversations with “Newt,” the GOP’s grand strategist who has become the very fulcrum of power in Washington.

She even admits to the pleasures of being interviewed on “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” the earnest--and some say elitist--public affairs program broadcast nightly on public television, a favorite GOP target for spending cuts.

Recently, when Waldholtz and other freshman returned to their districts exhausted but victorious after the GOP’s 100-day legislative sprint, each was able to trumpet achievements well beyond the usual reach of congressional newcomers.

They had dabbled in national tax policy. They had rewritten regulatory policy. They had spearheaded national movements to limit lawmakers’ terms and balance the budget. They hobnobbed with famous national political figures and even used their collective clout to make their sometimes-reluctant elders do their bidding.

“This is not,” said Waldholtz, “a group of shy people.”

But if the freshmen are unintimidated by Washington’s established powerbrokers, they also appear remarkably unafraid of the constituents who will decide in a short 17 months whether they will return to the nation’s capital.

Convinced that they were sent to Washington on a mission, they seem confident that voters will embrace their efforts, even if they appear in some ways to have become the very thing they campaigned against.

“Being an insider is only bad if what they’re doing in Washington is bad,” Waldholtz said of the new political equation. “If being an insider is seen as being part of the change, that’s good.”

In years past, freshmen were expected to return to their districts with hat in hand, boasting of nothing more grand than slavish devotion to constituent services--helping Grandfather Smith untangle his veterans benefits, finding out why Widow Brown’s Social Security checks stopped coming, supplying the American Legion post with a flag that once flew over the Capitol.

Typically, a freshman’s first-year resume of accomplishments needed to include floor speeches praising local citizens, a handful of modest legislative proposals (expected to go nowhere) and membership on a committee on which district interests could be served. Insider status was something to be worked toward in the distant future.

But Republicans--and especially freshmen, says Waldholtz--have upended the rules of the game. Not the least of which is the time-worn adage that all politics is local. In Waldholtz’s district, at least, that seems to be just the way voters want it.

At a recent town meeting here, several senior citizens sprang to their feet and insisted Social Security benefits be cut and Medicare be subject to means-testing, all in the interest of a balanced budget.

In another meeting, mayors raised questions on that most local of hometown concerns--highway funds. They wanted help fixing Salt Lake City’s congested and crumbling section of Interstate 15. But the local officials raised the issue in terms of Washington policy-speak: Will Congress, in a bid to tame the federal government’s regulatory powers, amend the Clean Air Act and turn highway funds, along with many other programs, into block grants?

Indeed, so changed is the political climate for freshmen that Waldholtz could, without fear of electoral rebuke, bluntly tell her constituents recently: “You all know cuts are coming, and you know it’s necessary.” So certain was she of her constituents’ willingness to accept such pain that she initially sought a spot on the Appropriations Committee. Her goal, she said, was not to “stick my nose so deep into the trough that I choked,” but so that she could more effectively cut spending.

Not exactly the abject catering to constituents that is the freshman’s usual brief.

“People in this community are not going to judge me on the basis of how much I bring home,” Waldholtz said in Salt Lake City. “They know about the budget and what it will take to balance it. They just want to make sure it’s fair. They want what they legitimately paid in, they want what’s fair. But they sent me to Washington to help solve a national problem.”

Such convictions have emboldened many freshmen to act in ways that, in earlier days, would have amounted to self-immolation. Republicans from farm communities, like Rep. Sam Brownback of Kansas, do not hide their willingness to cut agricultural subsidies. Newcomers such as Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona were sent to Congress with the help of business-oriented state Republican committees, but now lead the charge against so-called “corporate welfare.”

Rep. Michael P. Forbes of Long Island, N.Y., risked angering many constituents and most of his state delegation’s senior members when he opposed $315 million in funds for rebuilding Pennsylvania Station, the daily gateway to Manhattan for thousands of commuters. Forbes has said that a lawmaker’s willingness to cut such pork, even in his own back yard, is a test of a true commitment to balancing the budget.

Waldholtz has had countless special pleaders from home pass through her modest office in the Cannon Building, a cubbyhole from which freshman Rep. John F. Kennedy once dispensed favors to the people of Massachusetts’ 11th District. But Waldholtz says she is scrupulously noncommittal.

Reminding them that her campaign promise to help balance the budget comes first, she promises only to look into their pleas.

The willingness of the freshman class willingness to break political rules has become the stuff of Washington legends. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) likes to tell the story of a senior House Republican coming onto the floor and encountering a freshman casting a vote certain to be unpopular at home.

“Don’t you realize that vote you just made could cost you reelection?” the veteran asked in alarm.

“I didn’t come here to get reelected,” replied the freshman. “I came here to do the right thing.”

That kind of moral certainty--indeed sanctimony--has made many freshmen, including Waldholtz (considered one of the more pragmatic newcomers), a source of discomfort to veteran lawmakers. Among those chafing quietly are some of the very Republicans who owe their majority status to the incoming class. Not only do many freshmen give their elders a squeamish sense of having sold out all these years, but the newcomers’ unwillingness to bow either to congressional tradition or to a system of seniority has made many veterans uneasy on their new thrones.

“If there’s one thing my colleagues don’t have, it’s a lot of respect for the seniority system,” Waldholtz admitted. In an earlier interview with The Times, she talked at length about the freshmen’s sense “that Congress has stopped being responsive to the public, and that (freshmen) should not continue to do something or not do something simply because that is the tradition.”

As a result, newcomers such as Waldholtz have challenged virtually all of the perquisites and privileges other members took for granted, not the least of which is seniority. Waldholtz has waived her right to draw a generous congressional pension, and will accept no more than the inflation-adjusted annual salary of $89,000 lawmakers drew before they voted themselves a pay increase in 1989 (current pay is $133,600). Neither she nor her husband, Joseph, 32, a former GOP political leader in Pennsylvania, will accept the government health care benefits that all lawmakers receive.

Indeed Joseph Waldholtz, who serves as a full-time unpaid volunteer in his wife’s office, scoffed when asked whether he would join a group of congressional spouses, led by Gingrich’s wife, Marianne, to loosen rules against being paid for working in a spouse’s congressional office.

The role of the congressional spouse needs to be examined, he said, adding that he could never accept a salary for what he does. “We hold ourselves to a little different standard,” he said, “and people are less and less comfortable with things like that nowadays.”

Freshman ethics have affected the Waldholtzes’ personal lives in other ways as well. It is widely considered bad form among newcomers to settle into the Washington area for an extended stay. The Waldholtzes, who are expecting their first child in September, have rented a small house in Georgetown with a back yard just big enough for their beloved boxer puppy.

In her office, too, an ascetic ethic of stinginess reigns. Waldholtz plans to leave a quarter of her office’s $900,000 annual operating budget unused, and none of her staff members get anywhere near the maximum allowable salary. Perhaps most surprising for a freshman running for reelection, she has vowed she will not use the congressional franking privilege--a virtually unlimited pot of funds for mailings--except to answer direct inquiries from constituents.

At the end of the 100-day legislative sprint, Waldholtz took a key step toward imposing some of her own standards on her fellow lawmakers. She was the principal author of legislation that would ban gifts to legislators and reform lobbying activities--both campaign promises for her but a low priority for Republican congressional leaders.

She also has been a key player in moving legislation that would slash lawmakers’ free mailing privileges by 50% and substantially limit franking during election years, robbing lawmakers of a key campaign tool. She is a co-sponsor of legislation that would restrict lawmakers’ personal use of frequent-flier miles earned during government travel.

But no issue has shown this generational rift more dramatically than the debate over term limits. While the freshman class, virtually all of whom support term limits, pressed for a vote on the proposed constitutional amendment, many older lawmakers, including the conservative icon Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), bitterly rejected their arguments as arrogant, narrow-minded and demagogic.

“I once told an incoming class of freshmen, back when they let me speak to them at lunch, that they have to know the issues to be prepared to lose their seat over or they would do real damage here,” Hyde said in a delicate swipe at the class of 1994. “To me,” he added, “this (term limits) is such an issue.”

In the end, the veterans won. But first-termers like Waldholtz were unbowed, pledging to push toward victory on term limits after many of those who voted no--including Hyde--are punished for their votes by angry constituents.

“These are issues that don’t necessarily happen quickly, much as I wish we could make that happen,” Waldholtz observed after the vote. “But part of it is having lawmakers . . . understand what their constituents want. Sometimes it takes voting on it and falling a little bit short for people to say, ‘No, I really wanted that,’ and let their representative know that.”