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Last Updated June 10, 2005
The journey inward from the Pacific Ocean to the vast flatness of California's Central Valley passes through a wondrous variety of terrain. The traveler starts at the Golden Gate, with the lush green Presidio on one side and the bluff of the Marin mountains on the other; through the waters of San Francisco Bay, looked down upon by ridges above the East Bay on one side and the cone of Mount Tamalpais on the other; through the narrow Carquinez Strait to Suisun Bay, with its sloughs and marshes, fed by the sluggish waters of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Delta; and finally past the mountains and waters, to the flat, fertile expanse of California's great interior. This is not a journey most tourists make, but it was a familiar route to the first Americans in California and it passes by much of the industrial base of the Bay Area. On the east side of the bay is Richmond, developed almost instantaneously during World War II when Henry J. Kaiser built a shipyard in its deep-water port and 91,000 people from all over the country were put to work building ships for the Pacific theater; what became known as Rosie the Riveter Memorial Park is now a national park, and the city now has a 36% black population and is attracting high-tech spinoffs. Across Carquinez Strait is Vallejo, named for a Mexican general and member of the first California Senate, the site from 1853 to 1996 of the giant Mare Island Naval Shipyard, now being redeveloped, where 41,000 worked during World War II. Farther up the bay, on the south, is Concord, the largest city in the county, whose city officials were unique in that they lobbied the Pentagon to close the mostly unused Concord Naval Weapons Station; they wanted to use the land for business and residential development, which is banned beyond the urban limit that Contra Costa County voters imposed in 1990. The Defense Department complied and included the site on the 2005 base closure list. These shores are the industrial part of the Bay area, with tank farms and refineries. The towns are among the most ethnically diverse in the country, with large percentages of blacks, Hispanics and Asians and large numbers of Filipinos in Vallejo and other towns. The 7th Congressional District of California includes most of this passage, from Richmond to Vallejo (the 7th's largest city), Hercules, Martinez and Pittsburg. It also proceeds inland through the intermountain interstices of Contra Costa County to include part of Concord and northeast from Vallejo over the sloughs and up I-80 to include Vacaville, on flat land beneath Vaca Mountain. Politically, this industrial area was blue-collar, labor union Democratic back in the days when San Francisco, with its larger white-collar population, often voted Republican. Today housing values have risen, as they have just about everywhere in the Bay Area, but it remains heavily Democratic, liberal on most issues. But not as leftish as San Francisco Democrats: Contra Costa voters in March 2004 rejected 54%-46% a ballot measure which would have banned Wal-Mart super centers here. The congressman from the 7th District is George Miller, one of three remaining Democrats of the Watergate class of 1974 (the others are James Oberstar and Henry Waxman), the first baby-boom liberal to chair a House committee. He is heir to a tradition of Bay Area working class politics. His father was chairman of the state Senate Finance Committee; when he died in 1969, Miller lost the race to succeed him, but became a staffer for Senate Leader (and later San Francisco Mayor) George Moscone. Miller was a protégé of San Francisco Congressman Phillip Burton, who did so much to establish liberal hegemony in the House in the 1970s. To his work Miller brings an aggressiveness and zest for political combat reminiscent of Burton. He is a strong backer of protecting the environment against what he sees as greedy private sector operators and of furthering the causes of labor unions. Like Burton, Miller has grasped for top party leadership posts but hasn't made it. But he has learned a legislator's virtues of patience, timing and creativity. Miller began the 1990s in a position of power, able to advance his causes forward; in the mid-1990s he found himself defending yesterday's gains and trying to prevent losses; in 2001 he found himself working with a Republican president on one of his top priorities. In 1991 he became chairman of the Interior Committee (he renamed it Natural Resources in 1993 and Republicans renamed it Resources in 1995) and proceeded, in his words, "to kick ass and take names." He had long crusaded against water reclamation projects that provided cheap water to farmers. In 1992, amid a California drought, he passed a Central Valley Project law that raised farmers' prices closer to those of urban users and imposed environmental restrictions, over the fierce opposition of Central Valley politicians and Governor Pete Wilson. He passed the California desert bill, with Senator Dianne Feinstein, in October 1994; it was the last major legislation of the Democratic Congress. For several years in the minority he worked more to prevent change than to make change. He helped to stymie John Doolittle's attempt to revise the Central Valley Project and was part of the coalition opposing the Auburn Dam sought by Doolittle and others from the Sacramento area. He harshly criticized Republicans for trying to change the Endangered Species Act, EPA regulations, the bans on Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil drilling and Tongass National Forest logging and for commercial sponsorship of national parks; for the most part, he was successful, with help from the Clinton administration. He won with Republican Don Young in 2000 a major expansion of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, although the Senate scuttled a more sweeping version. The election of George W. Bush unexpectedly returned Miller to the center ring. He replaced the retired Bill Clay as ranking Democrat on the Education and the Workforce Committee. The incoming chairman, John Boehner, recommended that Bush include Miller and other Democrats in a pre-inauguration meeting in Austin. They struck up a cordial relationship; Bush started calling Miller "Big George." Miller is a Democrat who doesn't always follow the dictates of the teacher's unions; he seems genuinely concerned that too many American children are getting a rotten education. "My first concern has always been children. I look at the number of poor children who have been denied a chance at a real educational opportunity. This has to rank first and foremost." He came to believe that Bush shared that concern. Miller wanted more spending on education, but he also wanted more rigorous standards, with consequences. Boehner and Miller worked on a bipartisan basis on a committee that has usually had bitter partisan divisions. The committee bill provided more money and required uniform standards, though not the NAEP tests favored by Miller. The bill passed the House in May 2001 384-45. A different version passed the Senate in June 2001. At the bill signing in January 2002 Bush took care to praise Miller for his contributions. Miller has not been entirely happy with the way the administration implemented the law, however. He has continually complained that the administration and Congress have not appropriated the full amounts authorized (though that is standard practice on many programs). But he has also said that there has been progress by minority and poor students--his goal in the first place. Miller has fought the Bush administration and committee Republicans on many issues. He has sponsored a bill to allow unions to be recognized as bargaining representatives by securing signatures on cards and requiring arbitration of initial contracts: a cause going nowhere in a Republican or probably in a Democratic House. He worked to defeat the Department of Labor overtime regulations and lost on the floor. In February 2004 he got the House to vote 227-179 to extend unemployment benefits for six months, and was pleased when Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said extending benefits was "not a bad idea"; committee Chairman John Boehner objected that the states already had money to do this and that Miller's measure was ineffective because benefits weren't extended through the Labor Department; the argument was settled when the Senate failed to adopt Miller's approach. In 2004 he proposed, as an alternative to Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas's corporate tax bill, an American Jobs Plan that read like a Democratic wish list: rollbacks of incentives for outsourcing jobs, $40 billion of research and development spending, doubling of Pell grants, a federal broadband program, extension of unemployment benefits. He has called for consolidation of college loans and wants to encourage more colleges to participate in the direct loan program. When George W. Bush proposed to increase Pell grants by $500 over five years, Miller said, "My first instinct is to say, 'Show me the money,' because this administration has a track record of broken promises on education funding." Education and Workforce has had a history of being a committee sharply split on partisan lines from the 1960s to 1990s. But on the 2001 education bill Boehner worked closely with Miller, and in 2004 and early 2005 he seemed prepared to do that again on the issue of pensions. Miller praised Boehner for raising the subject in 2004, and in September 2004 the House placed on an appropriation Miller's amendment to require the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to disclose corporate pension funding levels to participants. When United Airlines threatened to terminate its pension plan in August 2004 and let the PBGC take over its obligations, Miller urged that it not do so. As the PBGC deficit doubled in 2004 to $23 billion, Miller warned of the possibility of "an S&L style taxpayer bailout of the agency to the tune of billions of dollars has increased." In October 2004 he sponsored a bill, "as a public marker," to freeze for five years the pensions of corporate executive who terminate employee pension plans or vastly reduce benefits. In early 2005, Boehner said he would work on pension law in terms that suggested a bipartisan approach might be possible. He defeated Miller's motion to give committee Democrats the power to call oversight hearings, but joined him in demanding an inspector general's investigation of the Department of Education's $241,000 contract with commentator Armstrong Williams. In local matters, Miller supported the anti-Wal-Mart ballot measure in Contra Costa and worked to reduce the number of slot machines in the Lytton Band of Pomo Indians casino in San Pablo from 5,000 to 2,500, though he had passed in 2000 an amendment freeing the casino from federal and state restrictions; Senator Dianne Feinstein in January 2005 moved to rescind the 2000 measure. Miller has been reelected by wide margins in this very Democratic district every two years.
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