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It might seem like members of the 111th Congress just left, but the 112th Congress arrives Wednesday, bringing with it an extensive new cast of lawmakers and Republican control of the House.

More than 90 new House members and a dozen new senators will take the oath of office when the House and Senate convene at noon on Wednesday. Shortly thereafter, Nancy Pelosi will turn over the speaker’s gavel and the management of the House to John A. Boehner of Ohio, a 20-year Congressional veteran who will complete an extraordinary return from exile after he lost a leadership position in 1998.

House Republicans will no doubt want to quickly put their stamp on the House and will start with a public reading of the Constitution, in recognition of the Constitution-embracing Tea Party movement that helped propel Republicans to a 63 seat-gain in the House in the November elections.

Republicans will then turn their sights on repeal of the health care law, as well as trying to follow through with their campaign pledges to cut spending and make House operations more transparent.

“We are going to be cutting the size of government, we are going to be cutting the deficit and we’re going to do it on the spending side, not by raising taxes,” Representative Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican in line to chair the Energy and Commerce Committee, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “And a year from now I think you’ll see the evidence of what we do in the House, for sure.”

Not all of the new members are new to Congress. The House has a handful of Republicans who took back the House seats they lost in 2008, and the Republicans arriving in the Senate include a former Republican senator, three just-departed members of the House and two former Republican House members.

Both parties are still trying to figure out how the new division on Capitol Hill will work in a practical sense, given control of the House by conservative Republicans matched up with a Senate that will still be managed by Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader. It is certain to be contentious and expectations for much consensus are low at the moment.

And Democrats say that Republicans, after two years in the minority under full Democratic control, are likely to find things a bit different now that they share some responsibility for governing.

“You’ve got to remember,” Representative Elijah Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” “they’ve been on the sidelines throwing spit balls saying no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

“Now they’ve got to do something,” Mr. Cummings said.

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Congress returns Monday for the more substantive phase of its lame duck session and Democrats have a big to-do list with no clear strategy for how to get it done.

After spending the week before Thanksgiving mainly on organizational duties for the next Congress, members of the House and Senate are now staring at a series of deadlines on spending, unemployment benefits and income tax rates among other issues and have to take some action or see programs lapse.

Democrats, still in charge of the House and Senate for a few more weeks, have aspirations that include repealing the military ban on gay personnel, passing a major nuclear weapons treaty, creating a new citizenship program for illegal aliens and extending Bush-era tax cuts only for people who earn less than $250,000. But at the moment, it is far from clear that the Democrats have the votes to achieve any of those goals.

As a result, Democrats at some point might have to throw in the towel and do the minimum necessary by continuing federal spending at current levels into next year and maintaining current tax rates before shutting down the 111th Congress.

On Fox News Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, predicted the tax fight will ultimately fizzle after both sides force a couple of politically difficult votes.

“There will be bipartisan support in the lame duck to extend all the tax cuts for two or three years, and I think that vote will be had before the end of the year,” he said.

Congressional leaders are scheduled to gather Tuesday at the White House with President Obama in a bipartisan meeting that was reset from earlier in the month. The session could foreshadow how President Obama and empowered Republicans intend to interact and perhaps the two sides can make some progress in figuring out a way forward.

In the meantime, Congress seems poised to pass a major food safety bill expanding the power of the Food and Drug Administration if the Senate gives its okay this week. The Senate will also get a new member Monday when Mark Kirk, a Republican congressman from Illinois, is sworn in as the state’s new senator, taking the seat that President Obama surrendered to become president. Mr. Kirk’s arrival will reduce the Democratic majority to 58 to 42 since he is replacing Democrat Roland Burris, who was appointed to the president’s seat.

Since a stop-gap measure keeping the government running is set to expire Dec. 3, both the House and Senate are likely to pass another temporary measure while they continue to work out how to approach the spending issues.

And the House is likely to consider an ethics committee recommendation to censure Representative Charles Rangel, the New York Democrat and former chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, over financial improprieties.

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