Washington ? Nothing better captures the difference between the Republicans who took over Congress eight years ago and those who control it now than their attitude toward term limits.

When the GOP rebels rode to power in 1994 under Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, after 40 years of unbroken Democratic control of the House of Representatives, one of the promises in their “Contract With America” was to limit the time anyone could serve in that body.

The promise was quickly abandoned, as far as the membership was concerned; a term-limits constitutional amendment failed to pass the House in 1995, as Tom DeLay of Texas, now the majority leader, led 40 Republicans who joined most Democrats in opposition. And this year, the first vote of the strengthened Republican majority in the House will likely be to remove the eight-year limit they set back then on anyone serving as speaker, the most powerful position in the House.

The motion to suspend term limits on the only member of the House Republican leadership who now faces such controls will be made by Roy Blunt of Missouri, the new GOP whip or deputy floor leader. This is the same Roy Blunt, he reminded me in an interview last week, who as a freshman member of the House in 1997 introduced his own term-limits bill.

Some die-hard advocates of term limits would call this a sign of hypocrisy — or evidence that Republicans have been corrupted by the power-seeking ways of Washington. They note that Blunt has been on the public payroll, first as a teacher and then as a local, state and national elected official for all but four of the last 32 years, and has founded a dynasty in Missouri, with his son’s election as secretary of state, the same job Blunt himself once held.

I think the opposite is true: The likely approval of the Blunt motion represents an acknowledgment on the part of Republicans that running government is a serious business where experience counts. The Democrats, to their credit, never fell for the fallacious idea that it was dangerous to representative government to allow folks to serve as long as their constituents chose to re-elect them.

Blunt is not the only Republican rethinking term limits. Michigan Gov. John Engler, who ended his notable 12-year run just the other day, told me last fall that he had come to see the downside of term limits last year, when dozens of veteran legislators were forced to leave their posts, and were replaced by men and women new to the job.

Michigan, like many other states, has been facing a serious budget crunch, “and term limits made my job much more difficult,” the staunchly conservative Engler said. “I had to spend a lot more time explaining and cajoling than I would have had to do with a more veteran group. And up until the end, a lot of them just didn’t want to vote for anything painful. It was much more of a struggle than it should have been.”

Engler said that term limits had contributed to the diversity of the Legislature, particularly opening the way for more women to be elected. But, he said, “it certainly did not add any political courage.” Backers of term limits have argued that if members knew they would serve for only a few years, they would be more resistant to lobbying pressures. Engler said exactly the opposite had been true in Michigan, where legislators approaching the end of their tenure often looked for ways to line up jobs with interest groups. An effort to create more charter schools in Detroit had just been foiled by a term-limited Republican looking for work with the teachers’ union, he said.

Blunt makes a somewhat different case for ending the term limits on Speaker Dennis Hastert and his successors. “I have no indication that (Hastert) wants to serve more than the eight years now allowed,” Blunt said, “but the ability of the House to act is lessened by a long-telegraphed message that the speaker won’t be there to fulfill commitments the leadership makes or to reward members who help us get the difficult things done.”

The lame-duck problem is inherent in term limits. It weakens presidents in the final two years of their second term. And it plagues legislatures from Florida to California, where a speaker is no more than sworn in than his would-be successors start trying to edge him out of office.

Term limits were part of the Republicans’ effort to downgrade the role of government and the competence needed to lead it. Now that more of them have seen government from the inside, they have a better appreciation of what is needed to make it work.