Here’s a partial list: welfare reform, federal job- and job-training program reform, several current and very hot labor-law disputes, changes in student-loan and financial-assistance programs, authorization of funds (or lack of such authorization) for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the confirmation proceedings of would-be surgeon general Henry Foster and now, at the behest of her Kansan colleague, Majority Leader Bob Dole, an in-depth study for the Senate of the whole, much-argued-over issue of affirmative action.

Just naming the parts makes you want to go lie down for half an hour. It also tells you that you are going to be hearing plenty about the junior senator from Kansas in the months ahead. She is someone people will want and need to know more about, and what they are likely to find out will be both unsettling to their preconceptions and instructive. Both Kassebaum’s record and political persona confound much of the current conventional political wisdom; she eludes, as she has from her first days in the Senate, all kinds of cliches and generalities and certitudes about Republicans, women in high office and, above all, long-term (17 years, now) government service.

We can start with the Republican part. Daughter of Alfred M. Landon, the presidential candidate whom FDR devastated in 1936; proprietor of a small working farm in her home state to which she intends to return, and an unshakable fiscal conservative, she certainly is a Republican. But even though Kassebaum has voted on many issues with the more liberal-leaning wing of her party in the Senate, as well as with Bill Clinton, she is not your basic liberal Republican. True, she made her party wild last fall – and knew she would, and risked it – by voting with the Clinton administration for the crime bill, which she finally decided was on balance more helpful than not; and she reportedly did herself little good with her fellow committee chairman, Bob Packwood, by suggesting that his admission of tampering with evidence he had forwarded to the ethics committee investigating him was reason for him to leave the Senate. Democratic liberals have been equally exasperated and/or disappointed by her coolness toward the president’s family-leave program, cherished AmeriCorps and other social initiatives that offended her conservative views of the way mandates should be laid down and government organized. She was very tough with the Smithsonian Institution on its first, now junked proposals for an Enola Gay exhibition that seemed to blame the war with Japan in the Pacific on the United States; she can be a foreign-policy hawk on some issues; she became a student of South African apartheid and an active American player in the efforts to undo it in the ’80s.

Kassebaum the Republican, in other words, can’t be pigeonholed, and this is true of her role as Elected Woman, as well. She is a divorced mother of four grown kids, who in midlife took up a career, and one of those females who have racked up a long list of ““firsts’’ and ““onlys’’ before their names for various achievements. As such she shares the sensibility that has brought women from different political points of view together on some large issues; but in this realm too she is notoriously independent – some say quirky and idiosyncratic – on those parts of the agenda she decides to espouse. She is a collegial and political enough creature to get along well in the Senate and make the deals when required and not faint at the idea that expediency is often at work. But she is mostly known for stubbornly chasing the facts until she arrives at what she takes to be the right position and then just pitching her tent and camping there – for as long as it takes.

This, of course, is the opposite of the current ugly image of the legislator as weakling and all-purpose crook. Kassebaum, who has become more authoritative and sure-footed with the passage of time, is a good argument against term limits, or at least evidence that length of stay in the Senate does not affect all legislators the same way. I don’t mean to make her sound superhuman or perfect or ideal or anything like that, which obviously she is not. Her political opponents at home no doubt would have much to say on that subject. What I think it is fair to say is that she is pretty universally regarded as a straight arrow, an impressive public servant and a senator who has grown and deepened in office.

The relevance of all this will become clear – perhaps excruciatingly and noisily so – when the bulk of the handiwork of the House Republicans comes to the Senate for action. The idea has gotten around that the House Republicans, in particular the zealous freshman class, have a mandate from electoral heaven to set the timetable, regulate the metabolism and define the legislative goals of the Senate. Already there is much complaining that the poky upper body is failing to get the message. In fact, the most interesting action in Washington this spring is not likely to be between Democrats and Republicans at all, but between House and Senate Republicans.

There are other Republican Senate chairmen besides Kassebaum who, though not given to the old, moss-bound Senate vanities and protocols, nonetheless believe they have a constitutionally blessed right and duty to look this stuff over, rework it according to their lights and not be hustled into anything. More than one House Republican will be standing there tapping his foot, looking again and again at his watch and issuing rude statements. My guess (it is also my hope) is that Kassebaum and some of her like-minded Republican Senate friends will politely ask them to take a seat while the Senate does the job it is meant to. Kassebaum in particular has inherited and been dished up an extraordinary load of difficult, consequential public business to conduct. You can be reasonably sure that she is going to do it her way, which is different from theirs.