The Republican Party’s agenda in the majority is, depending on what you read, either sweeping and dramatic or narrow and circumspect.

According to reporting by The Washington Post’s Robert Costa and Lori Montgomery, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) will burst out of the gate with proposals aimed at stripping the medical device tax from the Affordable Care Act and approving the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. Beyond that, the GOP aims to pass as budget for the first time since Barack Obama’s first year in office.

After that… not much. The Post reports that the GOP in the majority will seek to govern through consensus by forging relationships with minority Democrats and reinstating minority rights robbed of the GOP by Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV). Conservatives who would hope to see the GOP pass a doomed bill repealing the Affordable Care Act outright will be disappointed. “Though,” The Post reports, “the conservative campaign to undermine the law will proceed in the background.”

If, however, you read a joint op-ed in The Wall Street Journal composed by McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), you could be convinced that the GOP’s agenda is far more aggressive.

Looking ahead to the next Congress, we will honor the voters’ trust by focusing, first, on jobs and the economy. Among other things, that means a renewed effort to debate and vote on the many bills that passed the Republican-led House in recent years with bipartisan support, but were never even brought to a vote by the Democratic Senate majority. It also means renewing our commitment to repeal ObamaCare, which is hurting the job market along with Americans’ health care.

For years, the House did its job and produced a steady stream of bills that would remove barriers to job creation and lower energy costs for families. Many passed with bipartisan support—only to gather dust in a Democratic-controlled Senate that kept them from ever reaching the president’s desk. Senate Republicans also offered legislation that was denied consideration despite bipartisan support and benefits for American families and jobs.
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These bills include measures authorizing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which will mean lower energy costs for families and more jobs for American workers; the Hire More Heroes Act, legislation encouraging employers to hire more of our nation’s veterans; and a proposal to restore the traditional 40-hour definition of full-time employment, removing an arbitrary and destructive government barrier to more hours and better pay created by the Affordable Care Act of 2010.

The two GOP congressional leaders teased reforms to education, the tax code, and tort law. They add that the GOP’s famous deficit hawkishness will not ebb just because they are now the party in the majority, a major concern for conservatives with painful memories of the broken promises of the Bush years. The GOP leaders also touched on national security, and reviewing the conduct of the president’s war against ISIS in the Middle East, but, according to The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake, they were being modest. He notes that the Republicans, even the doves in the party, are interpreting Tuesday’s victories as an endorsement of a more aggressive foreign policy approach.

“You could call it the neoconservatives’ revenge or the year of the hawks,” Lake wrote.

Those hawks include some new faces in the Senate like Tom Cotton, the Republican from Arkansas whose campaign was boosted in its final month with ad buys from [The Weekly Standard editor Bill] Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel.

Other hawks like McCain have been around for years, but are now back in control of the powerful committees that exercise oversight of the Executive Branch’s foreign policy and war fighting.

McCain said his first order of business as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee will be to end the budget rule known as sequestration, which requires the U.S. military to cut its budget across the board. “I want to start an examination of our policies in the world and then find out whether we have the capability to meet these expectations,” McCain said. McCain also said he would use his chairmanship to root out overspending at the Pentagon, but he emphasized his desire to reverse sequestration.

Lake’s GOP sources expect the new Congress to vigorously oppose a deal with Iran which would leave it a nuclear threshold nation. They also expect to devote a new focus to a revanchist strain on the rise in Beijing and Moscow, and will seek to counter militarism in the South China Sea and in Ukraine.

While there is some ambiguity about how the GOP will govern in the majority, it is clear they will seek to create a contrast between their brand of governance and that of the Democrats. Hawkishness will be the order of the new day.