Anonymous in the House of U.S. Power

John F. Kennedy, newly elected to the House of Representatives, was rushing to cast his first vote in Congress when he encountered a balky door in the Capitol and tried to push through. “Keep your hands off that damn door until I get it hooked together,” snapped the guard on the other side.

This was a peremptory reception even for a freshman representative, but it dramatizes the vast difference between the House and the Senate. For even though the chambers are complementary branches of Congress, the 435 Representatives are more separate from than equal to the 100 Senators. A senator can expect instant recognition. A representative gets used to anonymity. “We know the senators can’t remember our names, and the governors don’t know our names,” Rep. Mike Synar (D-Okla.) says.

While a senator represents a consensus of the social, economic and political characteristics of his state, the legislative philosophy of a representative almost invariably reflects the social views, economic status and ethnic makeup of his district. House members therefore compose a mosaic of American diversity. They provide a political atlas that enables us to measure change--and resistance to change.

The South, for example, even while joining the two-party system--its 13 states are now represented in the House by 73 Democrats and 43 Republicans--continues to be a reservoir of traditionalism. Twenty years after the civil rights revolution, just one black, Mickey Leland (D-Tex.) holds a seat. Only three women, two of whom succeeded husbands, have surmounted the sex barrier.

California, conversely, provides a favorable climate for developing political diversity. It is the only state that has sent members of all the principal minority groups to Congress. Four of 18 black representatives, three of nine Latinos, and two of three Asians are from the state. So are three of 23 women, who continue to be a vastly under-represented majority except in Maryland, where they form half of the eight-member delegation (a phenomenon perhaps based on proximity). Neither the New York nor Texas delegation, second and third largest, boasts a woman.

Los Angeles furnishes the nation’s most graphic example of ethnic power. The central city area has three black congressmen: Augustus F. (Gus) Hawkins, Julian C. Dixon and Mervyn M. Dymally. East Los Angeles has three Latinos: Edward R. Roybal, Matthew G. Martinez and Esteban E. Torres. The West Side-San Fernando Valley area has five Jewish members: Anthony C. Beilenson, Henry A. Waxman, Howard L. Berman, Mel Levine and Bobbi Fiedler. With two exceptions, Fiedler and Manuel Lujan Jr. (R-N.M.), minority members of the House are all Democrats.

The coalition of liberals, progressives and ethnic groups forged by the Democrats during the Franklin D. Roosevelt era has persisted; and enactment of voter-rights legislation has solidified it further. During the past 56 years Republicans have been in control of the House for only four years, the last time during the first two years of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Administration.

There have been difficult past relations between Congress and the President but seldom has there been a more pervasive sense of frustration among both Democrats and Republicans in the House than there is now. The Democrats, whose majority has ranged from 51 to 104 during the past five years, awakened too late to the fact that when they acquiesced to the combination of President Reagan’s major tax cut and massive defense buildup in 1981, they forfeited their social agenda for the foreseeable future.

Feisty, 78-year-old Gus Hawkins who would, as chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, have been a powerful figure in prior times, is reduced to marking time. The deficits of the ‘80s, he complains, have eroded funds for education, health, welfare and housing, making social innovation all but impossible. As an example he cites Head Start, a highly successful program, now reaching only 18% of the children eligible.

The Democrats, in turn, have made the Republicans seem largely irrelevant in the House. During the ‘50s and ‘60s, the Republicans’ sense of frustration was tempered by the ability to influence legislation through alliance with Dixie Democrats. Today, however, a large number of these Dixiecrat seats are Republican; and congressional reforms of the ‘70s have made it hazardous for any Democrat consistently to oppose his own party. So there is far less opportunity for building coalitions.

Prior to the early 1970s, seniority was the absolute criterion for House advancement. Once a committee chairman obtained his position, he was lord of his jurisdiction, accountable to no one, removable through no ordinary process and privileged to act as arbitrarily as he was inclined. If every member of a committee voted to report a bill but the chairman opposed it, the bill was not reported. And woe to the member who challenged the chair--he became, literally, a nonentity.

Then, between 1968 and 1975, the Democratic membership succeeded in enacting a series of reforms that emasculated the Dixiecrat oligarchy and amounted to a parliamentary revolution. Committee chairmen were nominated by a newly created Steering and Policy Committee and elected by secret ballot. Subcommittee chairmen were chosen by the members of each committee. The Democratic Caucus was revitalized.

The end result was to democratize the machinery of both the Democratic Party and the House. Yet at the same time, by establishing accountability, the changes infinitely strengthened party discipline and party leadership. Will Rogers’s famous remark, “I don’t belong to any organized party--I’m a Democrat,” is no longer applicable to the House of Representatives.

The fate of major bills is now decided essentially by the Democratic Caucus; Republicans are presented with a fait accompli. Partly in reaction, a group of Republicans under the leadership of 51-year-old Jack Kemp (N.Y.), a Los Angeles native and former pro football quarterback, decided the time has come to restructure the appeal of the Republican Party. The 16-year veteran of Congress and chairman of the House Republican Conference is promoting a populist Republicanism that seems a contradiction in terms and would require the reform and abandonment of some of the party’s most cherished traditions.

“Call me a radical--in Latin that means going back to the roots, and the roots of the Republican Party are Abraham Lincoln, not Herbert Hoover,” Kemp says, speaking in staccato as if trying to beat the scoreboard clock. “This is a whole new party, not the old Republican Party of balancing the budget, fiscal austerity, cutting big government and limiting growth. Look at this in a Hegelian framework. We’ve switched from having an antithesis party to a thesis party. I mean, you can say we’re crazy, but we’re advancing ideas. I can go into any inner city or college campus and compete with any Democrat.”

While the atmosphere in the House has helped spur Kemp’s political pursuits outside of Congress, it has had much the opposite effect on 53-year-old Anthony Beilenson. A Harvard Law School graduate representing one of the nation’s half dozen most affluent districts, stretching from Beverly Hills through the southern San Fernando Valley, Beilenson is one of the most liberal congressmen on social issues, but a fiscal conservative who battled Administration budgetary adventures from the beginning. In 1979, Richard Bolling (D-Mo.), then chairman of the Rules Committee, handpicked him for a vacancy; Beilenson applied himself to the inside job, the nuts and bolts of legislation. Meeting in an intimate, low-ceilinged room across from the House Gallery, the Rules Committee is seldom covered by the press and all but invisible to the public. Yet, together with the Appropriations and the Ways and Means Committees, it controls the lawmaking process. While a Senate bill need only be reported out of committee to reach the floor, every House bill is directed from the committee of origin to Rules, which determines when a bill will be heard, the amount of time each side will be granted for debate and whether amendments will be accepted.

If the committee refuses to grant a bill a procedural “rule,” as happened frequently between 1955 and 1967 under the chairmanship of arch-segregationist Howard W. Smith (D-Va.), the bill is consigned to the legislative graveyard. In effect, the Rules Committee is the life and death arbiter of legislation.

Once cleared for floor action, a House bill encounters an entirely different atmosphere than it would in the Senate, where traditions and practices have changed little in a century or more. “Going from the House to the Senate is like going from prison to freedom,” said former Senate Parliamentarian Floyd Riddick. But the operation of the House, with its hundreds of members, would have broken down long ago if it permitted itself the oratorical and parliamentary licenses of the Senate. Its rules, detailed in more than 1,000 sections, are designed to cover every conceivable situation, whether “speaking reviling, nipping or unmannerly words” or “hissing, coughing, spitting.” A member is normally privileged to talk no more than five minutes on a bill or amendment, and overall time for debate is limited by the Rules Committee.

While the Senate floor, with its early American desks, seems frozen in time, the House chamber resembles a modern auditorium. An electronic voting system, when activated, illuminates the walls with the names of every member; and a scoreboard keeps a running tally while ticking down the time remaining, making a close vote as exciting as the last quarter of a football game.

A representative who has been an important figure in state government or business may not be prepared to settle for a minor role on the impersonal congressional scene. Committee assignments demand far less time in the House than in the Senate. The volume of mail doesn’t amount to much more in a year than a senator receives in a week. A representative has difficulty getting press coverage. The achievement of power, such as a committee chairmanship, is likely to take, even after the 1970s reforms, 20 years for a Democrat and a second coming of Lincoln for a Republican. More than a few House members ask themselves after a couple of terms: What am I doing here?

They might look to 85-year-old Claude D. Pepper (D-Fla.), who, after serving for 14 years in the Senate and being defeated for reelection in 1950, won a seat in the House in 1962, where he has risen to chairman of the Rules Committee. Or to John Quincy Adams, who became one of the most notable of representatives after an inconsequential term as President of the United States.

It is the House which was designated by the framers of the Constitution to represent the popular will, to guard the purse strings and to reflect the composition of the American scene. Until recent times, New York, Pennsylvania and adjacent eastern states dominated that scene. But following the 1990, census California’s delegation will increase, probably to 50 members, half again as many as New York’s or Texas’. California will have the opportunity to wield unprecedented influence over the course of national affairs. No state has ever had such a numerical edge.