Is It Too Late for Democrats to Put House Back in Order? : Congress: The Speaker’s word--and party’s agenda--is no longer law. Legislators listen more to public opinion.

When Thomas S. Foley came to Congress in 1964, a House baron offered the freshman Washington lawmaker some rules of survival: give unquestioning loyalty to his committee chairman, be strictly obedient to the Democratic majority leader and--most important of all--”pray God, trust and follow the Speaker.”

Nearly three decades later, Speaker Foley (D-Wash.) fondly wishes that he enjoyed that kind of deference himself, as he and other House leaders fight what at times seems to be a losing battle to keep their unruly Democrats in line.

“It is a different time,” Foley conceded in an interview Friday. “I’ve gone through the last almost 30 years now in the place and the institution has changed a lot. But it has changed in part because it is a representative body and the country has changed.”

The evidence of that shift has been building in the House for at least a decade, but never has it been so clear as this year, when Democratic ranks have shaken up things in ways that would have been almost unimaginable only a few years ago.

Brushing aside the once-inviolate wishes of powerful committee chairmen in favor of a clamor for deficit reduction from voters, the more independent-minded House Democrats have killed such sacred cows as the superconducting super collider and an advanced shuttle rocket engine for NASA.

In the name of reform, they have challenged many of the old ways of doing business--abolishing the fiefdoms of longstanding special committees and assisting the Republican minority in creating ways for legislation to bypass the tradition-bound Democratic committee chairmen entirely.

Foley and other House leaders also have been thrown off balance on several occasions by minority caucuses within the party demanding a bigger voice in leadership decisions. Earlier this month, for example, the Speaker acceded to Hispanic Caucus insistence that jobless benefits legislation be modified to protect welfare benefits for immigrants--only to be embarrassed when the House overwhelmingly rejected the measure.

Foley dismissed the incident as a “blip on the screen” but some members were troubled by what they saw as another indication of disarray.

“More members are making judgments based on their own views rather than marching in lock-step” with their leaders, said Rep. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), an appropriations subcommittee chairman who joined in an unorthodox drive to kill the super collider, even after his own committee had voted to save the atom smasher.

“Leaders really these days don’t have a whole lot of formal power to push people to vote their way, unless it’s some sort of blockbuster, make-or-break vote, where the future of the presidency is at stake,” added congressional scholar Norman J. Ornstein at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think-tank. “The average member doesn’t think twice or three times about going against the wishes of the leadership.”

In the view of many, however, this new-found independence is not altogether a good thing.

“Let’s not make them out to be heroes. Some of it is gimmickry,” said Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution, another Washington policy group. Lawmakers, he noted, took great pride this year in limiting the budgets of former presidents--a measure that made virtually no dent in the deficit.

Yet it is undeniable that there is a new atmosphere in the House--reflecting, to a large extent, the influence of the largest freshman class in half a century. Facing reelection for the first time next year, the 114 new members are under intense pressure to offer voters tangible accomplishments proving that they kept their campaign promises to shake up the old order.

Nowhere are voters clamoring for change more loudly than in the area of reducing spending. When Rep. Jim Slattery (D-Kan.) came to Congress 11 years ago during the regime of Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr., he recalled, a senior member usually could persuade a younger lawmaker to vote for a project by draping an arm over his shoulder and asking it as a personal favor.

But with discretionary spending now subject to strict caps, House members are painfully aware that spending for another lawmaker’s favored project means there will be less available for their own, or for reducing the deficit. “There’s more of an attitude of, ‘Don’t tell me about a personal favor when we’re talking about $1 billion.’ People are realizing that this is a zero-sum game,” said Slattery, who led the fight to kill the super collider.

So it is that House Democrats have been increasingly bold about defying the wishes of the Appropriations Committee, whose 13 subcommittee chairmen traditionally have been so powerful and secretive that they are known as “the college of cardinals.”

The cardinals, not recognizing the changing climate, suffered a self-inflicted wound to their invincibility last year after House Science Committee Chairman George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton) successfully led a charge to strip the energy and water appropriations bill of $95 million in pork-barrel spending.

Undeterred, the appropriators managed to slip it back into the defense appropriations bill three weeks later. When Brown discovered it, much of the House rank-and-file was outraged. The bitter feelings still linger, in the view of Richard Munson, author of a recently published book on the inner workings of the Appropriations Committee.

“Appropriators have long grabbed too much pork, but this was crossing the line. It was viewed as an example of sheer arrogance,” Munson said.

Occasionally in the past, the House would vote down a big-ticket item in an appropriations bill but the members almost always would accept its resurrection by the appropriators when the bill went to a conference committee with the Senate.

“We just absolutely blow these things out of the water again and again but they keep coming back,” said freshman Rep. Karen Shepherd (D-Utah).

On the super collider, however, House members held firm on the second round earlier this week. Indeed, 25 of the 50 Appropriations Committee members voted to reject their own committee’s conference report.

Veteran Appropriations Committee member Sidney R. Yates (D-Ill.) was one of those voting to kill the atom smasher. Once, he said, the panel always presented “a solid front. There still is a certain cohesion, but it’s not the same.”

While they are more resistant to their own leaders, lawmakers are more vulnerable than ever to outside pressures.

In part, Foley noted, this is because the reforms of the past have opened up the House to far more scrutiny.

More important, special interest groups have become increasingly sophisticated and powerful. “They depend on millions and millions of dollars a year of privately solicited and raised funds and, very often, they raise these by creating a sense of anger and outrage at the government--meaning the Congress,” Foley said.

This year, lawmakers are particularly sensitive to Ross Perot’s organization, United We Stand America, Inc., which may hold the swing votes in scores of congressional districts in next year’s elections.

“If it’s a choice between the leaders of their party and a half-dozen United We Stand members at home, they will opt for United We Stand, which is not exactly profiles in courage,” Ornstein said.

And even some freshmen said that they yearn for at least some of the order of earlier days. “Over eight months here, I’ve been distressed by the lack of discipline. . . . People are willing to vote the way they want to, without regard to the party or the needs of the party, which I find disconcerting,” Rep. Bob Filner (D-San Diego) said.

The lack of cohesion, he predicted, could make President Clinton’s agenda vulnerable to assaults by Republicans in the crucial upcoming debates over such issues as health care reform and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Yet Foley noted that for all the apparent disarray, House Democrats have given Clinton the winningest record of any chief executive since Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s.

“We haven’t dropped a single initiative of the President since he came to office,” the Speaker said.

On their most critical test, House leaders managed to save Clinton’s economic plan by two Democratic votes in the face of unified Republican opposition.

By comparison, Ornstein noted, the leadership’s recent setbacks amount to “minor embarrassments. The vote that mattered was the budget vote.”