Vasquez Journeys to Sacramento to Back Lungren in Hearing

Orange County Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez, who owes his own political career to Gov. George Deukmejian, returned to Sacramento Thursday in support of Rep. Daniel E. Lungren, Deukmejian’s nominee for California treasurer.

Vasquez, a former Deukmejian aide named to the Board of Supervisors by the governor less than a year ago, testified as the Senate Rules Committee concluded three days of heated confirmation hearings on the appointment of Lungren to the powerful post left vacant by the death of Democrat Jesse M. Unruh in August.

Lungren, a Long Beach Republican, will become treasurer, unless the Legislature rejects him by Feb. 29.

Vasquez, also a Republican, defended Lungren’s record on human rights and minority issues after witnesses Thursday morning criticized the congressman as insensitive to Latinos, blacks, women and Japanese-Americans.

“I have never heard Dan Lungren imply, suggest, infer or literally comment on any level in a way that would suggest to me that he is a racist or an individual who holds any element of discrimination against any certain class of people,” Vasquez said in an interview after he testified. “Anyone who suggests that or states that obviously doesn’t know Dan Lungren.” In his testimony, Vasquez said Lungren showed his compassion for Latinos by helping to craft the Immigration Reform Act of 1986, which Vasquez called “the first concrete step in addressing the plight and needs of the undocumented residents of the United States.”

The act, which has been condemned by many Latino leaders, particularly Democrats, established sanctions for employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers and created an amnesty program for illegal aliens who have been in the United States since Jan. 1, 1982.

Vasquez’s own parents, though U.S. citizens, were migrant workers in the Salinas Valley from shortly after his birth until he was 5 years old, when the family moved to Southern California. He said he has “watched with pain” as millions of workers have had to “live in hiding or as a shadow society” in fear of being deported.

“A leader of stature is one who understands the dimensions of compassion and one who can change his or her mind when the facts of an issue supersede even one’s own philosophical persuasion,” Vasquez said. “There is perhaps no greater example of compassion, coupled with a desire to establish a federal policy for border control, than the Immigration Reform Act.”

The comments from Vasquez, one of several witnesses for Lungren Thursday, stood in sharp contrast to what the Senate panel heard earlier Thursday, when the criticism of Lungren was so biting that the nominee’s wife, Bobbi, leaped to her feet in his defense.

“I think it is so unfair for people to get up here and call my husband a racist,” Bobbi Lungren said in an exchange with Senate President Pro Tem David Roberti, a Los Angeles Democrat.