Q & A WITH ANTHONY BEILENSON : ‘We Have Been Here Forever’

Anthony Beilenson’s announcement Wednesday that he will not seek reelection next year to the United States House of Representatives sent shock waves through Democratic Party circles and unleashed widespread speculation about possible successors. On Friday, Times reporter John Schwada interviewed Beilenson, the 11-term Woodland Hills Democrat who has exasperated GOP strategists with his ability to hold down the 24th Congressional District. Schwada found the lawmaker blaming a fat and lazy Democratic Party for its own defeat in the 1994 congressional elections. Still, Beilenson did not concede the future to the Republicans. He said that the GOP’s current popularity will be a passing phenomenon unless the party reins in its more rabid ideologues.

QUESTION: What was the reason for your decision to retire?

ANSWER: Look, I’m going to be 64 years old before the next election. Fortunately, I am still feeling fine, feeling 20 years younger than I am. But I have been in office 34 years--not 15, not 25, but 34 years. During the last election against Rich [Sybert, a Republican attorney who came close to ousting Beilenson in 1994], or maybe it was the one before against [Tom] McClintock, someone pointed at me during a debate and said accusingly, “He’s been in Washington forever.” And that night, my wife, Dolores, said to me: “You know, he was right. We have been here forever.”

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Q: Have any of your Democratic colleagues called to say they resent you for deserting the party when it’s down?

A: Those that are saying it are saying it very nicely. But actually, everybody’s completely understanding. It’s not as if I haven’t put in my time, and I do believe a Democrat can win this seat. Clearly, it was a difficult decision not to run. In fact, I postulated two things when thinking about what to do: that no one would run against me--which, of course, wouldn’t be the case, and that the Democrats would regain control of the House in 1996. But even if these favorable conditions prevailed, I still decided not to run. I wouldn’t care if they offered it to me on a silver platter.

No matter what, next year won’t be as disastrous for Democrats as 1994 because now the Republicans are in control of the Congress, and all those people who are mad at the government and voted Republican in 1994 will be mad at the Republicans in 1996. I also think people are growing increasingly concerned and frightened by the Republican majority and the Speaker [U.S. Rep. Newt Gingrich]. I see a drift back to the Democratic Party . . . mainly because of the issue of Medicare.

But what has really bothered me about the congressional environment now is all this ideological and mindless politics. I just started realizing a couple of months ago that I truly didn’t like coming to the Capitol every day, especially because of the ideological nonsense coming out of our newer Republican colleagues. Moderate, sensible, middle-of-the-road resolutions of issues seem no longer possible.

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Q: Wouldn’t Tony Beilenson be energized by a good debate?

A: I was for a while, until I realized that being thoughtful here doesn’t help anymore. Even many thoughtful conservative Republicans are finding it difficult here. Their proposals are being precluded by their own leadership because of pressure from the party’s freshmen ideologues.

Under the circumstances, it’s hard for Democrats to make a contribution to the running of the country.

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Q: Have you been thinking about who might be your successor?

A: I tried not to think about the local political scene in making my decision not to run again, except that I hope and expect a Democratic candidate will win.

I have been trying to reassure my Democratic friends . . . that we have quite a decent chance of winning this seat next year--in fact, a much better chance of winning it in 1996 than in 1998 with a new candidate because next year will be a presidential election year and the turnout of Democrats will be good again. One of the big reasons Democrats had problems last year was that it was a low turnout year. For example, I got 45,000 fewer votes in 1994 than I got in 1992, when Clinton ran.

But really, this consideration had nothing to do with my decision about when to leave. Of course, it did make me feel a little bit better about going now, because I realized the successor problem could be more easily solved [in favor of a Democrat].

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Q: Your proudest legislative achievements?

A: Obviously one of these was when I was a legislator in Sacramento and my therapeutic abortion bill was passed and [was] signed into law in 1967 by Gov. [Ronald] Reagan. We were the first major state to liberalize abortion laws. But here in Congress, I am one of 435 representatives. It’s harder to point at accomplishments. An obvious one, though, is the Santa Monica Mountains recreation area. But it’s been harder in recent years to keep the money flowing in even modest amounts to fund parkland purchases in the mountains than it was to create the recreation area in 1978.

I also think I made major contributions as chairman of the Intelligence subcommittee. Although I can’t talk about some of this [because of secrecy requirements], we did start to curtail the growth of the intelligence budget and forced the [CIA] to re-examine its role in the post-Cold War era.

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Q: What legislative plans do you want to work on until your retirement?

A: It doesn’t make an awful lot of difference what [Democrats] work on back here. That’s the problem.

In a very real way, however, the current situation for Democrats is our own fault. The Republicans are moving in all kinds of areas where Democrats should have moved in the past. They’re reforming welfare, congressional rules and practices and balancing the budget. Some of these are reforms that many of us Democrats had been pushing for years, but for a whole lot of reasons the party didn’t respond. I know exactly why people got fed up with us--although there was a lot of nonsense and hype out there on the talk shows.

I can’t say this very much around here among my Democratic friends but it was not good for one party to be in control for 40 years. We did become less sensitive . . . and a bit arrogant.

The nicest thing about the Republican takeover is that it gives them a good dose of responsibility. It’s been too easy for them. By being the minority party for so long, they became less thoughtful, less useful. They were sniping all the time. But now they’re in charge of both houses and finding it interesting, difficult and different.

On the whole, they are not doing as good a job as they should because they’re being driven by their ideologues. They are moving too fast at times or doing things without as much thought as is needed. Like their welfare reform proposal--it’s terrible. Sure, it’ll save some federal money, but basically it just dumps the problem of the poor on the states.

It’s to their credit that the Republicans are trying to balance the budget. But they are going about it wrong. We should be cutting spending, but not taxes, if for no other reason than when they cut $245 million in taxes, they must cut deeply--too deeply--into Medicare and Medicaid. I think decisions like these, of course, will come back to haunt them. Medicare needs to be brought into control, but they’re cutting too much.

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Q: Talk more about why you are so confident about Democratic prospects in 1996.

A: I predict the Republicans will start losing a lot of their seats if their hard-right, immoderate people continue to get nominated and run. They’ll lose 30 of their new people next year even if it’s just a 50-50 year for them. There’s no way that mainstream Americans, when they come out to vote again in greater numbers in a presidential election year, will put up with some of the extremist Republicans who were sent to Congress in 1994.

I also think Republicans will reap the whirlwind of the half-crazed electorate they helped create in the first place. For years, all they did was take potshots at us, and I don’t blame them. They were in a seemingly permanent minority position. But now you’ve got an electorate that they helped educate to believe government is untrustworthy and dishonest. There was a poll--and I could almost cry for them if it weren’t for the fact that they deserve it--that showed that 75% of Republican voters didn’t believe their own party was really going to be able to balance the budget.

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Q: Then, is there nothing good to come of the Republican majority?

A: I say often, and not facetiously, that there are two good things about the Republican takeover, assuming they act responsibly. One is that now we may do something about balancing the budget more quickly than would’ve happened if the Republicans weren’t in charge. And two is immigration reform. We have a very much better chance of doing something good to curb illegal immigration with Republicans in control. I believe that strongly. We’ll pass--probably early next year--a bill on illegal immigration, and I hope a bill that will also reduce the number of legal immigrants allowed into our country each year.

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Q: What was one of your toughest votes?

A: Actually nothing pops into my mind. There are difficult votes every year and every now and then you cast a vote and you just know, and that’s part of the problem, that if you vote what you think is right, it’ll hurt you back home politically. A couple of months ago, before I made up my mind to step down, there was a vote on the foreign aid appropriations bill. Now, the average American believes we spend 15% to 20% of our budget on foreign aid and that that’s too much. But actually we spend less than 1%, less than any country [as a percentage of budget] of any industrialized country. This year I voted against the foreign aid bill because we weren’t spending nearly enough.

The only program in the bill that was treated well was aid for Israel and Egypt. So I was happy with that but just because we got the money for that, it didn’t mean I was happy with the idea of clobbering the rest of our foreign aid efforts. So I voted against the bill, knowing that although most people would applaud my vote as a blow against a bad program, that wasn’t why I was voting the way I was. And I knew that my opponent would be taking my vote out of context and sending a letter to voters, only to ones with Jewish surnames, saying that I had voted against aid to Israel. [In fact, Sybert sent out such a letter, denouncing Beilenson]. But that too would be a distortion. The whole thing points out the dilemmas you face when you push a button to vote on a bill with 400 provisions in it. It’s an impossible situation. When your record is put under a microscope and your votes can be taken out of context, it makes it almost impossible to govern.

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Q: Do you and your wife intend to live in Los Angeles?

A: I have no idea in the world what we’ll do. I want to stay involved in public policy. But whatever happens, we’ll be able to spend a lot more time in California. Almost everybody in the world we care about--family and friends--are in Los Angeles.

I hope I can find something useful to do in areas having to do with the environment or population control. A House friend of mine from Florida, Pete Peterson, who announced a while ago that he was stepping down, told me the other day: “Don’t worry. When I announced, all sorts of people I didn’t even know called and offered me jobs.” But not a soul has called me yet.

I’d love to do some teaching. One thing in the back of my mind would be spending a short stint at the Kennedy School [of Government at Harvard University]. I would love to do that.

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Q: Anything else?

A: Yes, a totally personal thing. I want to say I feel so honored and fortunate to have spent so much of my adult life in public service and I feel enormously grateful to voters to give me the opportunity to serve them and the country.