A Protege Comes Into His Own : Congress: Contra Costa’s George Miller, a political heir of Phil Burton, takes over the powerful post of chairman of the House Interior committee.

WASHINGTON — When George Miller was a freshman congressman 16 years ago, he used to hang out in the office of Rep. Philip Burton, riveted by the machinations of an operator who was the nearest thing California had to a political boss.

A San Francisco liberal, Burton was the unchallenged master of the broken-glass-and-rusty-razor-blades school of politics in the House. Miller, then a 29-year-old Democrat from Contra Costa County, was his favorite protege. When Burton was wrapping up deals that he considered works of art, he would summon Miller to his office to see them closed. Miller joined the Interior Committee, where Burton was a power, and took up the causes that Burton championed.

He even adopted some of the bravado and gruff language that embellished his mentor’s combative style.

“If you’re going to get in a fight with me, you’d better bring your lunch,” Burton, a barrel-chested man with hair the color of steel wool, once warned an adversary. And he once told the San Francisco Examiner in an interview: “I don’t much give a damn about higher office. People sent me to Congress to kick ass and take names.”

This week, eight years after Burton’s death, Miller takes over the job that had eluded Burton, becoming chairman of the influential House Interior Committee at a time when environmental issues have turned the panel’s role upside-down:

The Californian will head a panel that has opportunities that Burton could only have dreamed about during the 1960s and 1970s. Once a bastion for conservatives from big mining and cattle-grazing states, the committee has become an “environment” panel.

Easterners and urbanites, joining more moderate Western Democrats on the panel, have shifted the balance of power. Today the committee has members from New York, Atlanta and West Palm Beach. It has a former Sierra Club staffer. And all of them stand high in rankings compiled by the League of Conservation Voters.

As a result, it’s widely expected that Miller will lead the committee into an era of unprecedented environmental activism, emerging as a far more aggressive figure in the debate over public lands and resource issues that have shaped the West--federal water policies, mining and grazing laws, offshore development of oil and gas, government relations with American Indians and the protection of fish, wildlife, ancient forests, wetlands and wilderness areas.

Barely 46, and with decades as chairman presumably ahead of him, Miller is positioned to become the most powerful member of the big California House delegation since Burton.

“This would warm Phil’s soul,” Leon Panetta (D-Carmel Valley), chairman of the House Budget Committee, says of Miller’s emergence as committee chairman. Burton “knew that George felt the same way he did about protecting the environment and taking on the interests that he fought against,” Panetta says. “I think he wanted George to carry on his legacy.”

Not everyone on Capitol Hill is overjoyed by the prospect of Miller’s leadership--particularly in the wake of retiring chairman Morris K. Udall (D-Ariz.), a master conciliator during his tenure before the toll of Parkinson’s disease and a serious fall forced him to step down last Saturday. Udall was personally revered as few members have been in recent times.

“Mo got things done by working behind the scenes,” says a Bush Administration official who deals with the committee, “but Miller too often works to create a scene.”

If Miller does create a scene, the betting is that it will most likely be over water policy. From the day he joined the Interior Committee--representing a congressional district whose water irrigates farms and slakes metropolitan thirsts far to the south--Miller has kept federal water policy reform at the top of his agenda. As Eastern politics follows money, Western politics follows water, he is fond of saying.

But water politics in Congress has dramatically changed since Phil Burton’s brash young sidekick started talking reform in the Interior Committee in the mid-1970s.

Getting an early start this year, Miller guided a compromise measure through the committee last week, hoping to see it finally clear Congress by summer. On the surface, the committee vote appeared to have been a breeze, but Miller had painstakingly worked out a compromise with Rep. Richard Lehman (D-Sanger), a friend who often joins him backpacking in the mountains and whose district in the Central Valley lives on irrigated farming.

The quest for a compromise was designed to maintain committee harmony as well as to improve the prospects of getting the bill through the Senate. It was distinctly un-Burtonlike but typical of Miller, who learned practical politics at the knee of his father and then from the late George Moscone, each of whom served as majority leader of the California state Senate.

Aside from water, the main item on Miller’s agenda has been children.

As the first chairman of the House Select Committee on Children, he led that panel for nearly eight years before resigning in January, when House Democrats formally made him acting chairman of Interior. His first bill, adopted by Congress in his freshman year, was the women’s, infants’ and children’s supplemental feeding measure, regarded by some as one of the most successful federal programs addressing a problem of the indigent.

But work on children’s issues has also provided Miller with some of his lowest moments in politics. In a 1989 disagreement over the funding of new child-care legislation, he split with one of his principal allies, Children’s Defense Fund chairwoman Marian Wright Edelman.

A year after the CDF had honored him as children’s foremost champion in Congress, Miller was bluntly accused by Edelman of sabotaging landmark legislation “for petty jurisdictional and power reasons.” The clash eventually was resolved, but it cost the congressman his friendship with the country’s best-known supporter of children’s causes.

In spite of the Interior job, Miller says he will continue to give children’s issues much of his time. “We are now on the crest of a second wave on a number of these issues,” he says, “how we treat foster kids and kids with mental-health problems, and what can be done for them at the local level. I’m not going to give that up, but it has made for longer days and shorter weekends.”

As carefully as he was tutored by Burton, Miller has never developed Burton’s insatiable hunger for power in the House hierarchy--or for influence over the California congressional delegation. His ambition, Miller once told his longtime top aide, John Lawrence, is to command his issues so clearly that wavering members of the House would cast their votes on the basis of his advice.

Miller clearly has his own. Although Burton derived his clout from his bare-knuckle style and instinct for the jugular, he was nevertheless a part of the House Establishment.

But Miller arrived in Washington in 1974, in a class of 75 new House members, many politically tempered by the anti-Establishment mood of the Vietnam period and the expose of the Watergate scandal. They were skeptical of calcified House traditions and the reverence for the seniority system that prevailed then.

Partly as a result, the current Establishment--to which the new Interior chairman and his generation belong--is a much changed one. Miller is one of the leaders of an informal, freewheeling pack, made up largely of members whose families have remained back home in their districts.

Miller’s wife, Cynthia Caccavo, lived in Washington with the congressman until the early 1980s, when she moved home to Martinez, Calif., so their two sons could complete their education there. George Miller IV is now in law school at the University of South Carolina and Stephen Miller is an undergraduate at UC Berkeley; Caccavo is chairwoman of the Contra Costa County Mental Health Advisory Board.

Miller, meanwhile, shares a Capitol Hill townhouse with Panetta and Reps. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Marty Russo (D-Ill.). Since the family moved to California, he has regularly flown to San Francisco late Friday nights, returning to Washington on a Sunday or Monday “red eye” flight.

He and his frequent companions on the journey--Panetta and Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae)--have made the grueling cross-country trips so frequently and so long that they have become known as the “gruesome threesome.”

Back in Washington, Miller’s “pack,” which usually meets for dinner on Tuesday nights, also includes Boxer and Reps. Tom Downey (D-N.Y.), Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), Fortney H. (Pete) Stark (D-Hayward) and Ronald V. Dellums (D-Oakland). Reps. Ted Weiss (D-N.Y.), Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and John Lewis (D-Ga.) occasionally show up as well.

The gathering is both social and political but not confined to liberals. Conservative Rep. Edgar Jenkins (D-Ga.) sometimes comes, as did Rep. Ron Flippo (D-Ala.) before he left the House to run for governor. Their common ground, Miller asserts, is “a sense of urgency--people who sometimes become very frustrated at what goes on here.”

The pack doesn’t gather to develop political positions, but there have been times when there was common ground. Last year the Tuesday night dinners became important strategy sessions in planning the group’s opposition to the first White House-congressional budget summit agreement, which was eventually defeated. When the summit reconvened and produced a second version, the members of the Tuesday night group threw in their support. The agreement was adopted.

Miller contends that the gathering provides a better feel for what goes on in the House than one ever gets in committee meetings or conversations on the House floor.

Not all of Miller’s days in the sun have turned out so happily, however.

Last year Miller and his friends Downey, Russo and Stark found themselves spotlighted in a case study of congressional junketeering by ABC News’ “Prime Time Live.”

As part of a congressional delegation that visited Argentina, Brazil and Costa Rica to discuss trade and economic issues, they wound up the trip with a five-day stay on tropical island of Barbados. There, hidden cameras photographed members of the delegation, led by Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), cavorting on the beach with female lobbyists.

Although the trip, which ABC said cost taxpayers more than $100,000, took place during Congress’ Easter recess, the program was not shown until just before the November election. Miller, friends said, was furious, but aides talked him out of any attempt to counterattack. His less fortunate traveling companions, Downey and Russo, were grilled on camera by ABC’s Sam Donaldson.

Although Miller is one of the relatively few members of Congress who does not recoil at being labeled a liberal, he is, like Burton, more pragmatic than his reputation suggests.

Even when he builds a head of steam on the inequity of irrigation subsidies to corporate farmers, he backs away from criticism of the wealthy California interests who manipulated federal construction of the dams and aqueducts that made California an agricultural empire.

“Thank God for the old rascals’ being a part of California’s history,” he says. “Without them, California today would probably look a lot like Nevada. But now it’s up to us to manage what they did, including cleaning up serious environmental harm.”

Miller says the transformation of the House Interior Committee really began when Burton was on the panel and continued through the years that Udall was chairman.

“It’s a national committee that deals with national issues,” he says. “It’s not a private club of Western representatives anymore.”

But others credit Miller with having played the leading role in bringing aboard members whose constituents have no vital economic interest in public resource issues that dominate Western politics.

“Here’s how he did it,” says a source close to the new chairman: “He said, ‘Just come aboard. You don’t have to come to all of the meetings. You can give me your vote, I’ll cast it with the environmentalists, and you will have a 100% green record. You can spend your time working on your major committee. It’s a wonderful opportunity for you to have a solid environmental voting record and not have to invest a lot of work.’ ”

Now George Miller will reap the harvest.