Unruh’s power derived from his control over legislators. Lacking a strong party organization to help a legislator facing a tough race, it was Unruh’s ability, and nobody else’s, to help those loyal to him with money and choice committee assignments. As such, he was often hostile to the “outsider” liberal reformers elected to office in the 1960s and set on changing the old ways. Unruh thought the old ways worked just fine. His famous remark about lobbyists gives a good sense of his outsize personality, and of how things were when I arrived in the State Assembly: “If you can’t take their money, drink their booze, screw their women, and then come in here the next day and vote against them, you don’t belong in Sacramento.”
The great struggle between Jesse Unruh and Pat Brown had ended just before I arrived in Sacramento. Ronald Reagan had defeated Brown in the 1966 gubernatorial election. And though I won an Assembly seat in 1968, my party hadn’t fared remotely so well: The Republicans gained a majority, relegating Unruh to an unaccustomed place in the minority. Suddenly, Democrats found themselves united on recovering a majority.
Unruh was no slouch at organizing. He and his allies had long taken money from the special interests to fund the campaigns that kept them in power. At his say-so, Democrats in safe seats would often raise money for colleagues facing tough races in order to maximize the party’s strength—a smart strategy. It wasn’t enough to keep the Republicans at bay in 1968. But a new generation of liberals that included many of my fellow Young Democrats—John Burton, Willie Brown, Dave Roberti, and Bob Moretti, to name just a few—had begun winning Assembly seats, and brought with them new methods of organizing that they now deployed on behalf of the broader party. The computerized targeting that my campaign pioneered was one such technique, and it earned me a central role in our counterattack.
Late 1960s Sacramento had a distinctive political culture. It was a capital in the middle of nowhere, so legislators tended to go up for the week and return home on weekends. A legislator’s Sacramento social life consisted mainly of raucous parties. (If nothing else, Jesse Unruh’s political philosophy put a premium on conviviality.) Because so many of the men brought their girlfriends to these parties, wives were not welcome. The social pressure was strong enough that when I met my wife, Janet, during my time in Sacramento, I had to break the news that I could bring her to some of these gatherings—but only until we were married.
Perhaps not surprisingly, when it came to committee assignments, most legislators scrambled for seats on what were known as the “juice committees”—those responsible for overseeing the special interest groups that lavished the most desired forms of attention on lawmakers. One such committee dealt with racetracks; another oversaw liquor sales. Seats on the juice committees were a sought-after plum; chairing one guaranteed that you would be feted like a Roman nobleman. Several of my colleagues seemed to orient their entire careers toward realizing this distinction.
AS SOMEONE WHO WAS LOW-KEY BUT HIGHLY POLITICAL, I WAS more than satisfied to chair the Elections and Redistricting Committee, and hired Michael Berman to be my right-hand man. With Unruh planning to challenge Reagan for the governorship in 1970, my friend Bob Moretti was angling to become the next Democratic speaker, and I was set on doing everything I could to help him. He turned to me to ensure that our party would be in the best possible position to win and hold on to a majority after the decennial round of redistricting.
Political redistricting is one of those obscure backroom exercises whose particulars can be dry and difficult to understand, but carry great weight in the stakes of power. Every ten years, in statehouses across the country, the geographic boundaries of congressional districts are redrawn (“redistricted”) to reflect the latest demographic information from the United States Census. If a state’s population increases, as it usually does in California, the state might be awarded additional congressional seats. If it has declined, seats can be taken away. Either shift sets off a mad scramble—driven by ambition, party loyalty, and raw self-interest—to craft new districts. In California, the party that controls the state legislature gets to redraw the map.
Democrats were fortunate enough to win back a narrow majority in the State Assembly in 1970, the year in which the new census data were released. Bob Moretti became the new speaker. My job was to consult with Phil Burton, a master of redistricting now serving in Congress, to figure out how to draw a map that would yield the best result for the Democratic Party. It was a lot of work, but I was confident we’d get it done well before the end of the summer. So Janet and I planned our wedding for October.
In theory, redistricting should be a simple exercise: Fiddle with the borders until you’ve maximized the number of safe Democratic seats and call it a day. In practice, I was soon to discover, the task demands an advanced degree in psychology, a tireless capacity for salesmanship, and the patience of Job.
Redistricting brings out the best and worst in politicians. Although an admirable few agree to whatever map best serves their party’s interests, many more beg and plead for what seem the strangest of reasons. Say a district is redrawn in such a way that it maintains a member’s core constituency and adds a few more Democratic neighborhoods. Surely an easy sell. But you never know how the incumbent will react. “Oh, but my brother-in-law lives over here—I can’t possibly give up that neighborhood!” “Don’t you dare chop off the western edge of my district—my biggest donor lives there!” “Please, Henry, give me more Republicans if you must, but put my mother-in-law in the next district over!”
And, of course, when you have as narrow a margin as we Democrats did that year—42-38—anyone can hold up the process. At the same time my Democratic colleagues were wheedling for geographic favors, my Republican counterpart, Jerry Lewis, who later became a colleague in Congress, was doing all that he could to protect his own party’s incumbents. Redistricting always labors under the threat that if the minority party is sufficiently aggrieved by the map, they can go to court or, if the governor is a member of the party, have him veto the bill. The negotiations dragged on, and my wedding date loomed ever closer. In late summer, it looked briefly as though we might strike a deal. But a special election held in August flipped a seat to the Republicans, further narrowing the margin. Janet and I decided we had better go ahead with the wedding.
When the big day arrived, no deal had been reached, though one did appear tantalizingly close. Many of my colleagues attended the wedding. As the new Mr. and Mrs. Waxman greeted the receiving line, I spotted our brand-new Speaker Moretti looking preoccupied. When he reached Janet and me, he congratulated us and then leaned in close to whisper. “Look, Henry,” he said, “I know it’s your wedding, but a couple of the guys coming down the line haven’t committed to the bill yet…” As the recalcitrant assemblymen made their way down the line to offer their blessings, I thanked each of them and then added, “Now, I sure hope I can count on your support for the redistricting bill.”
That fall it finally passed—and Governor Reagan promptly vetoed it. We appealed in vain to the California Supreme Court. The law states that “the governor must sign the bill” and Reagan refused, wagering that a court-mandated plan would better serve Republican interests than did ours. The court called for a new map for 1974 and used the old districts for 1972. Two years’ hard work amounted to a do-over.
THANKFULLY, MY ASSEMBLY WORK WAS NOT LIMITED TO REDIStricting. Early on, I decided that in order to become an effective legislator I should develop an area of expertise, which would enable me to exert outsized influence whenever that subject arose. Because my district was home to a large elderly population, health policy struck me as a good specialization. People always need good health care and it is an area where government has historically had a hugely beneficial effect: providing access to care, supporting research to prevent and cure diseases, and overseeing the system to end abuses and ensure efficient function. In 1968, health policy was also an excitingly new frontier. Congress had recently created the federal Medicare and Medica
id programs, and making sure that they were properly implemented was among the most important services a legislator could provide his constituents.
Since this was the furthest thing from a juice assignment, the speaker was happy to appoint me to the Assembly Health Committee. In order to learn the ins and outs of policy, I began consulting doctors, hospital administrators, constituents, and anyone else I thought might have something to teach me. Lobbyists, too, are always eager to “educate” legislators on their pet issues, at least from the point of view they were paid to push. To avoid being hypnotized by their arguments, I also subscribed to physicians magazines to learn what issues doctors were concerned about and to see if there was a way that I might be able to help.
When my first legislative session began in 1969, Ronald Reagan had targeted Medi-Cal (as California’s Medicaid program is known). As a conservative, Reagan was eager to shrink the size of government, and intended to cut a significant number of people from the program and reduce payments to doctors who treated Medi-Cal patients. Both actions would lower the cost—though with the obvious negative effects of leaving many people uninsured and diminishing the number of doctors willing to treat those still covered.
The health committee held hearings on Reagan’s proposals to illustrate the likely consequences of his cuts. In addition to garnering public attention, this prompted the California Rural Legal Assistance to file suit to halt them, on the grounds that Reagan did not have the right to take away people’s health care by removing them from Medi-Cal, an argument the court upheld.
During the next legislative session, after I declined the redistricting job and became chairman of the Health Committee instead, Reagan tried again. Constituents and public interest groups had been complaining to me that some state-licensed Medi-Cal plans were run by operators who did not have the contracts with doctors and hospitals that they claimed in order to get government funding, and thus could not provide access to the care that patients needed. People duped into enrolling in bad plans discovered that they couldn’t get out of them.
Having been prevented from kicking Medi-Cal recipients out of the program, Reagan next tried to move patients from private doctors to health maintenance organizations, or HMOs, as a way of limiting costs. Medi-Cal paid the bills of Californians who chose to visit their own doctors. Reagan wanted to move them into HMOs in order to cap the amount of money the state had to pay. My father’s union had offered membership in Kaiser Permanente’s HMO, so I had always looked favorably upon the concept and believed that HMOs provided a model for the future of health care. But the system Reagan presided over was badly flawed. Though patients in Medi-Cal HMOs cost the state less than those going to private doctors, many of these plans did not have doctors or other medical personnel to see people when care was needed.
Instead of removing people from Medi-Cal, Reagan had state workers go door to door in poor neighborhoods tricking people into “voluntarily” signing up for HMOs. Sometimes these workers dressed as doctors and frightened people by saying that they had to switch over to the HMO or they’d lose their health care. This created a terrible situation. Many of the people who signed up for the plan did not understand what it was and wound up being turned away by their old doctors. This left a sick and vulnerable population confused and unable to get the health care to which they were legally entitled.
As chairman of the Health Committee, I held oversight hearings to dramatize many of the abuses being inflicted at Reagan’s behest, and we set to work writing legislation to halt them. In 1972, a Republican colleague and I authored the Waxman-Duffy Act, which set standards for HMOs that included public hearings to establish that anyone seeking a government Medi-Cal contract had the necessary financial resources and service providers to deliver quality care to his patients. Seeing how the combination of oversight hearings and legislation could improve the lives of so many people further persuaded me of what government can do for its people.
NOW THAT I WAS MARRIED, I DECIDED THAT MY OWN LIFE WITH Janet and my stepdaughter, Carol, needed a little more grounding. The life of a legislator can be an oddly transient one. Because district borders can shift so easily, I’d always held off on buying a house. But feeling that my Assembly seat was more or less secure, we decided it was time to find a home for our family.
When we were first married, Janet had spotted a house that she loved in Sacramento. Serendipitously, it appeared on the market right around the time we decided to settle down. She went for a tour and returned declaring that she had indeed found our dream house. So we bought it.
After the legislature and governor failed to pass a redistricting law for 1974, the court appointed an independent “master” to draw the lines. On the same day in 1974 that we moved into our new Sacramento house, the California Supreme Court released its redistricting map, which made it clear that I’d win my next Assembly race easily. It was also clear that I had a safe path to the local State Senate seat if I wanted to go that route. But another possibility was even more tantalizing: A brand-new congressional district had been drawn in the area and therefore lacked an incumbent.
Janet and I discussed the options and quickly agreed on our next move. “Let’s do Congress,” she told me. “I won’t unpack.” As fast as we’d bought it, we turned around and sold our dream house and moved back to Los Angeles to prepare for my next campaign.
People tend to assume that the most difficult part of a political race is facing off against the others who have chosen to run. But often the key to winning is convincing potential opponents not to run in the first place. That was the task before me as I plotted my 1974 congressional campaign. The new district was so safely Democratic that my main job was to persuade fellow Democrats not to run against me. `
In order to show strength, I began by collecting the endorsements of as many public officials and community leaders as I could in the hope of discouraging potential challengers. The most imposing looked to be a city councilman named Ed Edelman, who was already running for the position of Los Angeles county supervisor. I went to visit him and proposed that we support each other: I’d endorse him for supervisor and he, in turn, would endorse me for Congress. Edelman was clearly tempted by the bigger prize, but he’d already embarked on one race that my endorsement would make a little easier to win, and after weighing his options, he agreed. Our plan worked. That fall, I was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from California’s 24th District without even facing significant competition.
THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS “CLASS OF 1974” WAS A HISTORIC one because it was the first elected in the wake of Watergate. Ninety-two new representatives, most of them Democrats like me, swept into the House of Representatives bearing a message of reform. Though Watergate had played almost no role at all in my own race, I shared the eagerness for change and the desire to take on the entrenched powers and clean up Washington.
When I arrived in Congress, the reform movement already could be thought of as manifesting on two fronts. The first was within the Congress itself, as a younger generation tried to dismantle the antiquated seniority system. From around the turn of the century, congressional rank had been determined solely by a member’s length of service. This meant that the most powerful legislators were simply the ones who had been around longest. They chaired the most important committees, and their power was nearly absolute. A chairman could create and abolish subcommittees, name the subcommittee chairmen (taking the role for himself if he wished), and determine when to hold hearings. The chairmen also controlled the entire committee staff.
The seniority system produced the handful of famous Southern Democrats who had long dominated the Congress when I arrived. Nowhere were the system’s shortcomings better illustrated than in Howard “Judge” Smith of Virginia, chairman of the House Rules Committee, who had managed to block civil rights legislation for years by refusing to allow bills to go to the floor for a vote. When the Civil Rights Act of 1957 came before his committee, Smith famously declared, “The Sout
hern people have never accepted the colored race as a race of people who had equal intelligence and education and social attainment as the white people of the South.” It took reformers five years to change the rules sufficiently for the Civil Rights Act to make it to the House floor.
Behavior like Judge Smith’s so disgraced the old system that challenges finally became possible. In 1971, members passed a resolution stipulating that seniority would no longer be the sole criterion for chairmanships and established voting procedures for the removal of chairmen. In 1973, the first such votes were held, though they were little more than formalities, and every chairman survived. In 1975, the influx of change-minded members that I was among provided the impetus to finally topple a few of the old lions: Wright Patman of the Banking Committee, F. Edward Hebert of the Armed Services Committee, and W. R. Poage of the Agriculture Committee.
What was overtaking Congress in the 1970s was a lot like what had occurred in the California Assembly in the 1960s. A new generation was fighting to change the old way of doing things—and now, as then, the man at the center of the action was my friend Phil Burton. Burton was the chairman of the Democratic Caucus, and like many reformers of the day set on shifting the balance of power from the chairmen to the caucus members. Burton wanted the chairmen to feel that they were accountable, not just to themselves but to the other Democratic members of the House. The unexpected defeat of three committee chairs in 1975 conveyed the message loud and clear.
The Waxman Report Page 3