So, More Seats, More Ideologues?

The logic of the American system of proportional representation is deliciously Darwinian: Those who have a lot (of people), get more (votes), which can be used to obtain a bigger share of whatever it is the government has to dispense. But in this, as in so many things, California is the “great exception.”

Over the past decade, according to the 1990 census, California’s population has grown a dramatic 26.1% to 29.8 million. That ought to confirm this state as a congressional powerhouse: Its House delegation, already the largest among the 50 states, will increase by seven seats to a huge 52. Its 26-member Democratic caucus, which contains influential individual members of substantial seniority, is the majority party’s largest single state delegation. In the normal course of things, such numbers would be consequential. It was no accident, for example, that the so-called Massachusetts miracle, on which Michael Dukakis so proudly campaigned, occurred during the speakership of the redoubtable Tip O’Neill.

California’s problem is that its congressional delegation is twice divided against itself. First, the state’s Democratic and Republican contingents contain some of the fiercest ideologues on either side of the House aisle. The distance between them is so great that they no longer bother trying to carve each other up and have taken to bloody intramural feuding. The GOP’s hard-right faction, for example, recently ousted relative pragmatist Jerry Lewis of Redlands from the party body that makes House committee assignments. The Democrats, meanwhile, have split along north-south lines in the fight that led to the removal of San Pedro’s Glenn M. Anderson as chairman of the Public Works and Transportation Committee.

In such an atmosphere, one speaks of simple coexistence rather than cooperation. The more important question is why California’s congressional delegation is so fractious. Some have attributed its condition to the state’s sheer size and diversity. California, they say, never will attain congressional coherence because it is too big, embracing too many antagonistic economic, ethnic and social interests.

Perhaps. But equally important is the inordinate number of brittle, shrilly ideological representatives we send to Congress. It is no accident that the increase in their numbers has coincided with a process of reapportionment that produces nothing but “safe” seats. Candidates whose party registration virtually guarantees election in their district have none of the incentive toward flexibility and moderation that occurs naturally in competitive races.

That’s something worth considering as the critical reapportionment process begins anew.