I'd missed the Postpiece yesterday which details the Dem leadership's revised plan for dealing in the House with the ethics bill which figured as item #1 in her program for the first 100 hours:

Instead of forwarding one big bill, Democrats will put together an ethics package on the House floor piece by piece, allowing incoming freshmen to take charge of high-profile issues and lengthening the time spent on the debate. The approach will ensure that each proposal -- including banning gifts, meals and travel from lobbyists as well as imposing new controls on the budget deficit -- is debated on its own and receives its own vote. That should garner far more media attention for the bill's components before a final vote on the entire package.

This is refreshingly bold thinking from the Dem House leadership, and certainly deserves (and will be getting) a good deal more consideration.

Straight off the bat, though:

First: As the Post piece points out, the advantage of the piecemeal approach is that it highlights individual elements of the ethics package, allows particular Dems to be spotlighted as proponents of each element and puts GOP reps on the spot by facing them with RCVs on each one.

On the other hand,

Such a freewheeling approach could expose disagreements within the Democratic Caucus. For example, some members think that an independent board should be created to conduct ethics investigations and mete out punishment to members who violate House rules. Others say the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, informally known as the ethics committee, can handle the assignment as long as leaders allow it to do its job.

Secondly, procedural considerations will bear on how this all plays out.

How, for example, will the bill be handled in committee? For instance, in the long New Direction document on page 29 of the PDF, it says,

Bills should be developed following full hearings and open subcommittee and committee markups, with appropriate referrals to other committees.

I'm not clear how the timetable for the ethics bill would allow more than a whistlestop in standing committee, another in Rules before the bill hits the floor.

There's also the question of the special rule governing the ethics bill. The Post piece says the Dem leadership

may even let the divisions play out in public, with amendments allowed that may or may not pass, on issues from campaign finance to independent oversight.

That would follow (to some extent, at least) the proposal on the same page of New Direction that

Bills should generally come to the floor under a procedure that allows open, full and fair debate consisting of a full amendment process that grants the Minority the right to offer its alternatives, including a substitute.

Of course, one particular complaint about the way DeLay ran the House was that floor hours were short, much time wasted with trivial suspensions (renaming post offices was a favorite!) and important bills debated with inadequate floor time under closed rules.

(Perhaps Pelosi expects her experiment in democracy to fail under attack from GOP guerillas, and hopes to use that as an excuse to revert to closed rules!)

We'll see. But the leadership's lack of fear to innovate and take risks is certainly striking and cautiously to be welcomed.