Verdict Is Still Out on California’s Clout

When the Republicans stormed the gates of the House of Representatives in 1994, there was considerable hand-wringing over the dethronement of dozens of venerable Democratic power brokers.

Like them or loathe them, these chairmen of committees and subcommittees had traditionally shaped legislation with one eye on party tenets and another on funneling federal programs and money to their home states.

Everyone knew how the game was played.

Make no mistake, when the electoral House-cleaning came, the lamentations came from Democrats, who thought the word “minority” referred to a malady that struck only Republican households.

But even among jubilant GOP members, the dismantling of the old hierarchy was cause for some unease.

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Nowhere was the concern more prominent than within California’s GOP delegation.

The problem was clout.

California “lost” five full committee chairmen in the GOP takeover. After the Republicans organized their troops, only one Californian, Rep. Bill Thomas of Bakersfield, headed up a full committee--the inward-gazing House Oversight Committee.

To ameliorate this perceived waning of California clout, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, with a good bit of fanfare, quickly named a Task Force on California to mind the state’s Washington business.

So no one would feel left out, the task force includes all members of the state’s GOP delegation, with Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas) as its chairman.

“Initially, the sense was that the loss of five committee chairmen would diminish California’s effectiveness in Washington,” Dreier said this week.

To drive a stake into the heart of that idea, Dreier has issued a GOP report card of sorts, a compilation of legislative accomplishments that his task force has wrought in its first year.

“I argue that the report demonstrates that the delegation’s power has not been diminished but enhanced,” Dreier said.

The seven-page report lists bills and amendments that Dreier and his 25 GOP colleagues say benefited California, ranging from efforts to improve patent protection for biomedical research to reimbursing state costs of jailing illegal immigrant felons to lifting of unfunded federal mandates.

The report card has a predictable self-congratulatory air, but is not necessarily a record of completed accomplishments.

Many of the task force efforts highlighted in the report were vetoed by President Clinton--such as the prison reimbursement funds.

Other accomplishments--such as the unfunded mandate law--were passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.

So what’s the point? Politics as usual, say Democrats, nothing more than taking credit where none is deserved and bashing Clinton because, well, because he’s Clinton.

“This is like a speech given at noon taking credit for the sunrise and predicting the dark of night,” said Rep. George E. Brown Jr. of San Bernardino, the dean of California Democrats. “I don’t like to make strident claims that the Democrats are doing it all or knocking the Republicans for claiming a lot of stuff they’re not doing.

“The fact is we’ve got a Republican governor, a Democratic president, and a congressional delegation split right down the middle. Two Democratic senators give a slight edge. But we need common ground to accomplish anything,” Brown said.

Dreier couldn’t agree more on the need for bipartisanship. But he insists that it’s the task force that has demonstrated a cooperative spirit.

“I really made an attempt to reach out on bipartisan issues like Medicaid and disaster aid. For the first time in a long, long, long time we have been at least trying to work together in a bipartisan way that did not exist in the past.”

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So, with the Republicans in control of Congress, how has California fared?

The usual escape hatches seem to apply: It’s too early to tell, Congress is a work in progress.

This much we know: California is a crucial political battleground for winning the White House. Clinton is furiously courting it. Republicans want to be seen as courting it just as furiously.

To Brown, the GOP report card is simply an attempt “to prevent the Democrats from looking like the source of all the benefits coming to California.”

To Dreier, the task force, along with Gingrich’s leadership muscle, has pushed issues that Democrats had talked about raising for years.

“Simply bringing these items up is an accomplishment,” Dreier said. “The Democrats didn’t have the political will.”

So, is California better off with a Republican Congress?

The only report card that really counts arrives on the first Tuesday in November.