Fear not.

Tom Blackburn explains why last-minute scare mongers chanting "Pelosi. Pelosi. Pelosi" need not make you so afraid as to go running back into the secure arms of ... Dennis Hastert.

There is another reason why "Pelosi, Pelosi, Pelosi!" is a red herring. It has to do with how legislative bodies, like Congress, work. Voters may pay attention to elections, but it's awfully hard to hold their interest long enough for them to understand processes.

Think about this: The Democrats are the minority party and elected a minority leader to, well, lead them. The Republicans, as the majority party, can elect the speaker, which they did, but they also elected a majority leader to lead them. That's Rep. Boehner. Rep. Hastert's job and title is speaker of the House. "Of the House" is important.

The speaker is supposed to look after the House's institutional interests, to make sure that bills move and are truly debated in an orderly manner. If the speaker is good - recent ones haven't been - at the end of the session, majority members go home happy and minority members go home satisfied.

In the majority, you are happy if almost all of your bills passed in a form you can live with. If you are in the minority, you don't expect to pass many bills but want to feel you've been treated fairly. It's the speaker's job to produce those feelings. One thing this means is that whether the speaker personally is liberal or conservative, he or she will be less so, and more majoritarian, while in the speaker's chair. If you want Rep. Pelosi to act less like a Democrat, the fast way - since you can't defeat her - is to make her speaker so she has to concentrate on making the House's trains run on time.

In an important new book, Broken Branch, Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution finger the loss of institutional identity as the House's problem. Members act more like field reps of their party than as members of the first branch of government. The Constitution gives them powers of oversight over executive agencies and of the budget, but they don't show much interest in using them. The authors count the number of days Congress isn't in session while members run for reelection and the decline in the numbers of hearings about anything, including the legislation they pass.

Before he said he wasn't told what he forgot about Foley, Rep. Hastert was famous for keeping the vote tally open three hours beyond normal, in the middle of the night, and treated his constitutional peers like fractious fifth-graders while twisting Republican arms to pass what became Medicare Part D.

Even majority party members felt treated unfairly. For a few hours that night, some Republicans would have preferred Rep. Pelosi as speaker of the House. "Pelosi, Pelosi, Pelosi!" might have looked pretty good to them.