Republicans Tire of Minority Status in House : Politics: For 40 years, Democrats have run the show. GOP members such as Robert K. Dornan of Garden Grove find it nearly impossible to get bills passed and frustratingly difficult to be heard.

Sometimes when the U.S. House of Representatives is dark, when the suits have gone home and the C-SPAN camera is turned off for the night, Rep. Robert K. Dornan slips into the speaker’s chair, a cushy leather number ceremoniously perched high above the rest.

The chair feels good. The congressman feels bad.

“I fantasize,” the veteran Garden Grove lawmaker says wistfully. “Not of being the Speaker of the House, just of being a member of the majority party.”

He dreams of a day when there might be more of him than them, more Republicans than Democrats, more conservatives than liberals. Of an end to the tyranny (his word) of a party that hates his right-wing guts.

For 40 years, the lower house of Congress has been dominated by Democrats, an vexing legacy for the 176 Republicans--six who represent Orange County--relegated to the heap dubbed “minority members.”

This is about more than losing almost every time there’s a vote. Republicans rarely get invited to the White House. They never take home the brass-plated souvenir gavel that tells the world “I presided over the U.S. House of Representatives.” They are never allowed to sit in the Speaker’s chair, not while the House is in session, anyway.

For awhile, the most powerful Republican members of the House’s various committees started calling themselves “vice chairmen.” The Democrats passed a rule busting them down to “ranking member.”

This is a world where Democrats make all the rules, decide which bills come to the floor and what gets debated. If a Republican has an idea for a bill, the Democrats may well ignore it. “If they like it, they steal it and put their name on it,” one aide grumbled.

They are always outnumbered, always outgunned, always out-staffed. The only saving grace is that, had the tables turned four decades ago, the Republicans would have done the same thing.

“Of course,” concedes Rep. Christopher Cox, a three-term Newport Beach congressman who was a toddler in diapers the last time his party ruled the House.

In fact, some say that when the Republicans were in charge, they were even worse.

“I’m told they fired all the staffs. I’m told they were really tyrannical,” said Rep. Don Edwards of San Jose, chairman of the California Democratic Congressional Delegation. And why shouldn’t the Democrats prevail? They win more elections. But even Edwards acknowledges that, in some cases, the imbalance of power has gone a little far.

“Their points are well-taken,” Edwards said. “But somebody has to run the House.”

It didn’t start out this way. The powerful Rules Committee, which decides whether amendments to a pending bill can be discussed, has grown tougher over time. In 1977, it restricted amendments on only 15% of all bills. By last month, it was restricting them on 80% of all bills, severely crippling the opposition to most laws in the making.

This more than anything steams the Republicans, who say they can deal with defeat. What they cannot abide is never getting heard in the first place.

“You don’t get to decide which bills come to the floor, which witnesses come to the hearing, what the hearing topic is or the direction of the questions. And you don’t get to decide what amendments can be offered to the bills that are brought to the floor,” said Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the House’s second-ranking Republican. “You are a team perpetually playing defense. Every once in a while you intercept the ball and score a touchdown. About every six or eight weeks.”

Much of what Washington does it does in committees, and the committees are shored up by thousands of staff--lawyers, secretaries, researchers, experts--there to educate members of Congress so they might debate intelligently.

When it comes to staff, the Democrats always have more. On the subcommittee on crime and criminal justice, for example, the Republicans have Andrew Cowin, the staff counsel; Cowin has one secretary.

“The Democrats have five lawyers and three or four other staff assistants,” an exasperated Cowin recently said. “I have me and Audray (the secretary), and I share her with another lawyer.”

All of this can prove somewhat embarrassing at election time because Republicans rarely get bills through. Dornan, for example, seems forever haunted by the fact that in his years in Congress he has never passed a bill, unless you count his resolution paying tribute to Walt Disney several years after Disney died.

Dornan, a glass case of miniature Mickey Mouses and other Disney figurines gracing his outer office, bristles at this charge. “The liberal hatchet men say, ‘This is all he has gotten through.’ That’s a big lie. Gerry Ford was here 25 years and he never had a bill with his name on it.”

In the legislative session last year, there were only two bills where Republican votes meant the difference between victory and defeat.

“Occasionally, they matter,” one veteran Washington reporter said. “But most of the time they don’t.”

The minority members measure victory in other ways--in amendments rolled into Democrat-sponsored legislation--(“And I’ve had more of those than anyone of my tenure,” Dornan says)--or leverage asserted at opportune moments.

When the Democrats needed Rep. Dana Rohrabacher’s cooperation in some obscure procedural matter that threatened to keep President Clinton from going to Moscow, the Huntington Beach Republican agreed to cooperate if the Democrats would let him pay homage to everyone who died fighting communism.

Clinton went to Russia; Rohrabacher is getting a monument.

“Without that, I never would have even come close,” the congressman said.

Despite the hurdles, the Republicans seem to get plenty done. Rohrabacher says it was his public crusade in Los Angeles that led Congress to deny quake aid to illegal immigrants.

Still, had Dornan known it would be like this, he might have thought again when he entered the congressional freshman class of 1976, so charged up with bicentennial fever he hardly noticed the Republicans had lost the White House.

“Let me tell you what hurts,” Dornan said mournfully, a Diet Pepsi in one hand. “It’s the little things--here comes a freshman I never laid eyes on before and all of a sudden I look up and he’s in the speaker’s chair. I am seeing people with half my time in Congress chairing subcommittees that I serve on.

“It is so frustrating. If I had known that for the next 18 years it was going to be like this, I wouldn’t have come to Congress.”