WHEN DAVID Wilkins is re-elected House speaker today, he will lay out his priorities for the upcoming legislative session. But he will also take time to look back over the 10 years since he and his colleagues became the first Republicans to take control of a legislative body in the Deep South since Reconstruction.

It’s been a remarkable decade — one of opportunities seized and opportunities missed, one of most harmful initiatives blocked by the Senate and of smart, even progressive, initiatives enacted. It has featured high-profile clashes with two Republican governors and one Democratic governor, and constant bickering with Democratic- and Republican-led Senates. And through it all, the Republicans in charge of the House have continued the tradition begun by the Democrats who ran the House before them — of steering the direction (or the indirection) of the Legislature that in some way controls nearly every aspect of life in South Carolina.

The low point of the GOP decade came early, when the triumphalist Republicans pushed through a poorly thought-out local tax cut that upended the balance of taxation in the state, and then tacked on meddlesome, unwarranted limitations on how local governments can tax the people who elect them.

A decade later, Democrats blame the residential property tax rollback for the state’s fiscal crisis. Criticisms of the plan are justified, but this one isn’t on point: If the Republicans hadn’t obligated the money to taxpayers, they would have spent it on new government programs. To the extent that the property tax rollback has contributed to the crisis, it’s because the Legislature didn’t roll it back in the same way it rolled back other spending items.

The problem of reduced revenue was compounded when House Republicans pushed through truth-in-sentencing legislation. Since it wasn’t accompanied by smart sentencing guidelines, it resulted in a steady increase in our prison population — an increase we simply cannot afford.

The biggest problem with the anti-tax movement was the limits on local government. They kicked off a decade of small assaults on the idea of local self-governance — flying in the face of the Republican claim of support for pushing government decisions to the most local level possible.

But most of the House’s bad ideas — from attacks on the environment to further unjustified tax cuts — have been stopped in their tracks at the Senate doors.

And many, many impressive, forward-thinking initiatives have gone forward.

The most surprising — in the Nixon-goes-to-China mode — was pulling the Confederate flag off the State House dome and out of House and Senate chambers. The compromise wasn’t perfect, and the way the Legislature finally reached it was far from satisfying, but it was a huge step forward.

Unlike most major initiatives over the past several decades, this one wasn’t initiated by the House leadership team; some would argue it was forced down its throat. But even that is extraordinary given Republicans’ historic devotion to things Confederate, and given that the party had drawn voters to its 1994 primary by offering them a deliberately pro-flag “referendum” — a referendum those Republican voters used to send a potent pro-flag message to the representatives who seized power later that same year.

Other initiatives have been less surprising, but still important. Since taking over, the Republican-led House has spearheaded successful efforts to:

• Outlaw the scourge of video gambling.

• Pass sweeping accountability legislation that is beginning to produce astounding progress in our public schools.

• Reform a judicial selection process that was marked by vote-trading and back-scratching rather than a serious consideration of candidates’ qualifications.

• Plug gaping loopholes in the state’s campaign finance law that had made its reporting requirements virtually meaningless.

• Redirect the state’s welfare system toward job training and education, and in so doing reduce the welfare rolls.

• Mitigate the damage the lottery can do to the poor by limiting the type and amount of advertising and the type of “games” offered, and mitigate the damage that can be done to the body politic by outlawing lobbying and campaign contributions by lottery vendors. Of course, the House did nothing to stop our state creating a gambling enterprise to begin with.

In recent years, though, the House’s agenda has become less sweeping, less impressive, as budget shortfalls have consumed legislative attention.

And it has been in dealing with that fiscal crisis that the House leadership team has indulged its greatest sin — the sin of omission. It refused to use the opportunity of budget shortfalls to live up to GOP rhetoric about cutting the waste out of government. Instead of surgically paring out all of the programs and even whole agencies we could live without, it took a meat cleaver to the state budget. The result was a reduction in the Highway Patrol along with the Arts Commission; fewer teachers along with fewer extension agents.

The crisis is not over. And whether the House manages to reassert itself as a progressive agenda-driver and finally make the difficult choices necessary to manage a shrunken budget will go a long way toward determining how history views the second GOP decade.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.