Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, was appointed Thursday to the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, a position he hopes to use to try to expand the Veterans Affairs clinic in French Camp and to try to prevent the Veterans Affairs hospital in Livermore from closing.

Secretary of Veterans Affairs James Nicholson is expected to decide early this year if the Livermore hospital will close. McNerney said Nicholson would receive direction from Congress through the veterans committee.

“(The Livermore hospital) is already there; it doesn’t make sense to close that one down,” McNerney said Thursday. “At the very least, I think we should turn it into a place where veterans can decompress.”

The congressional freshman recently toured the hospital, built on 200 acres, with Nadia McCaffrey, whose son was shot and killed in Iraq. The Tracy woman is trying to raise $25 million for a self-sustaining veterans’ commune where soldiers returning from war can peacefully recover from wounds and post-traumatic stress disorder.

McNerney expects the number of veterans needing care in the U.S. to grow in the coming years because of the Iraq war, and he said his district has a disproportionately high number of veterans.

President Bush announced Wednesday night that he would send 21,500 more troops to war, arguing in part that past efforts to secure Baghdad failed because there were not enough troops to occupy neighborhoods that had been cleared of the enemy.

But McNerney said he would prefer a political solution to the conflict — one that includes diplomacy with Iran and Syria — and he hopes that the Democratic majority can prevent the escalation.

“We can pull into committee and question the people that are planning this (troop increase) and make sure that they have plans that make sense,” McNerney said.

Congress could also affect the way the war is fought through its control of the federal budget, but McNerney said he hasn’t yet decided whether he supports such an approach.

McNerney said he plans to return home to Pleasanton tonight, “thrilled about the stuff that we’ve accomplished.”

McNerney’s votes helped this week to raise the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, to instruct the government to implement 9/11 Commission recommendations and to amend the Public Health Service Act to allow stem cell research.