“You don’t have money to fund the war or children,” said Mr. Stark, an early opponent of the Iraq war. “But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people, if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.”

Those comments nearly got Mr. Stark censured in the House. More recently he was found to have applied for a state tax exemption for his Maryland home even though he was still a legal resident of California.

But 3,000 miles away, where his district is stacked with liberals who share his outrage, his words barely caused a ripple. A lack of respect for decorum when addressing Republicans is hardly the kind of thing to get a man in trouble in Hayward or Fremont.

And if Mr. Stark’s outbursts have made him less effective than he might otherwise be as a representative, his constituents have a hard time ever hearing about it. His district is in something of a news media vacuum, across the bay from San Francisco and squeezed between San Jose and Oakland. No major media outlet covers him closely..

Mr. Stark’s district is a mix of blue-collar workers and employees of the growing number of high-tech companies around Fremont. It is so heavily Democratic that Mr. Stark has never attracted a serious Republican opponent. For a Democrat to oppose him in a primary would take tremendous financial resources and, probably, greater sins by Mr. Stark than he has committed to date.

“It’s a safe Democratic seat, and no one has ever come along who has wanted to push him out,” said Tony Quinn, who follows California’s Congressional politics for the Target Book, which he helps edit. “Nobody has ever challenged him.”

The biggest risk to Mr. Stark, 78, might be the Bay Area’s demographics and his own colleagues in Congress. The region may lose a Congressional district when the lines are redrawn after the 2010 census, because its population is waning compared to the rest of the state’s.

If that happens, one Democrat is going to have to go. And after last week’s slap from his party’s leadership, Mr. Stark had better watch his back.