But as the 109th Congress gets down to business with President Bush's State of the Union address tonight, California wields power as it never has before.

It's not just the numbers.

Sure, 53 of the 435 House members come from California - a powerful voting bloc. The next largest state in that category is Texas, with 32 House seats.

But more than numbers, the growing seniority of the state's delegation reaches down to who controls the gavel.

With the recent election of Rep. Jerry Lewis of Redlands to head the powerful House Appropriations Committee, California Republicans now head six of the 21 House committees.

The House, as decreed by the U.S. Constitution, is where every spending bill for every federal agency and program starts. And it's the House Appropriations Committee that writes those bills.

The money for all this spending comes from taxes, and tax laws in the House are written by the House Ways and Means Committee, whose chairman is Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Bakersfield.

Then comes the parade of other California power brokers:

* House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunt er, R-San Diego, who late last year forced a showdown with the White House over an intelligence bill.

* House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Chris Cox of Newport Beach, who serves in the additional role as chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee.

* House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier of San Dimas, who oversees the less obvious but enormously influential job of setting the rules for floor debate on bills - and determines whose amendments will be allowed to come to a vote.

* House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo of Tracy, who plays a large role in setting federal lands policy and this year will be raising the hackles of environmentalists over proposed revisions to the Endangered Species Act.

Democrats in the California delegation outnumber Republicans 33-20, but they are in the minority party in the Republican-controlled House. That doesn't mean they are not powerful, however.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, is the minority leader of the House and a leading national spokeswoman for the party. Four other California Democrats occupy the ranking seats on committees - George Miller of Martinez, on Education and the Workforce; Henry Waxman of Los Angeles, on Government Reform; Tom Lantos of San Mateo, on International Relations; and Jane Harman of Venice, on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

If the mood of the voters shifts next year and Democrats are restored to power, Pelosi would become House speaker and the four ranking members would become committee chairs.

Rarely do states have the power California has accumulated.

"The closest parallel is Texas in the 1930s," said John Pitney Jr., a government professor at Clare mont McKenna College.

That's when Texans headed eight standing committees, Democrat Sam Rayburn was on his way up to House speaker, and former Speaker John Nance Garner was Franklin D. Roosevelt's vice president.

"This is virtually unprecedented for California, and frankly, California is the envy of every other state," said Rep. John Doolittle, R-Roseville, who also is on the power ladder as secretary of the House Republican Caucus.

Sacramento, of course, lost a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee with the New Year's Day death of Democrat Robert Matsui. But the Sacramento area gained in Republican seniority with the election of former state Attorney General Dan Lungren to succeed retiring Rep. Doug Ose.

Ose left after three terms. But Lungren stepped into his seat with 10 years of seniority by virtue of his earlier tenure as the congressman for Long Beach. That seniority won Lungren seats on the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees, and subcommittee assignments that are going to make him a big player on immigration reform and other issues of the day.

"We've never seen this before," Lungren said of the delegation's muscle. "Californians ought not feel that they are not being heard. But what the results are, we'll just have to see."

A powerful congressional delegation is one thing. Putting it to good use for California may be another.

That takes coordination. And while the California Democrats and the California Republicans hold weekly caucuses, they almost never get together in the same room at the same time to talk about the same thing.

Then there's the problem of federal money. There's precious little of it.

While Lewis will be in charge of spending what there is, to get his chairmanship Lewis had to promise that he would put the brakes on runaway spending.

Not everyone believes him, though.

David Williams, vice president of Citizens Against Government Waste, which tries to follow every dollar Congress spends, said his group regards Lewis as a pork-barrel spender. That means he is a champ at tucking in a few hundred thousand here, a few million there, for the folks back home.

"We hope he is not going to balance the California books on the backs of federal taxpayers," Williams said.

With Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other state politicians screaming about Californians sending more money to Washington in taxes than they get back in federal services, Williams' concern is understandable.

But Pitney said that about the best the California congressional delegation will be able to do is "help the state get a fair hearing."

"California members can and do help the state win specific projects," he said. "But most of the federal budget goes to entitlement programs such as Social Security. Unless California members can persuade more seniors to move here, they can't change the state's share of Social Security spending."

Sarah Binder, a congressional expert at the Brookings Institution, said that while the state's House delegation has tremendous clout, its two Democratic senators swim in a sea of Republicans.

"It may be that California's lack of Republican representation in the Senate hurts them in securing benefits for the state," she said. "It is a bicameral Congress, after all."

And Nelson Polsby, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, said the tight concentration of power even within the House Republican leadership makes a repeat of the Texas power team of the 1930s much less likely.

"That sort of clout is today diminished because of the extreme centralization in the way Republicans organize the House," he said.

Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, knows firsthand that power in the California House delegation doesn't necessarily mean easy victories.

Thompson last week reintroduced a North Coast wilderness bill that in the last congressional session cleared the Senate with high praise from Democrats and Republicans, but didn't draw even a hearing before Pombo's committee.

Pombo has promised a hearing this year, Thompson said. But on state issues, Thompson said it's going to take more work from someone like Schwarzenegger to bring the divergent congressional delegation together.

"Power is good," he said. "There is no end to how it can benefit our state. But I think more needs to be done by the governor to make sure we maximize our support."