Rogan Bridges Partisan Gap : Politics: Conservative Glendale assemblyman wins respect from both parties for his reasoned discourse.

When a bill to legalize the medical use of marijuana was in jeopardy in an Assembly committee recently, an unlikely ally came to its rescue: Assemblyman James Rogan, a true-blue GOP conservative whose background as a prosecutor and Glendale judge might have suggested he’d reject it.

Rogan, it turned out, had impassioned words for the measure, telling of a cancer sufferer in his family whose doctor recommended he turn to the streets to buy marijuana. He cast a crucial “aye” vote to keep the bill alive.

Rogan’s departure from the party line illustrated a trait that many of his colleagues have come to regard as refreshing--a willingness to bend the partisan cookie-cutter mold that often shapes voting patterns in the Assembly.

Just one year after winning a special election to represent Burbank and Glendale in the Capitol, Rogan has emerged as a key legislative leader known for using reasoned discourse to help bridge the partisan gap. This born-again Christian with a right-wing bent has astonished many by becoming admired by liberals and conservatives alike.

With the marijuana bill vote, “he showed himself open to understanding, the science of the issue and to people’s pain,” said Assemblyman John Vasconcellos, a Santa Clara Democrat who courted Rogan’s support for the bill. “Based on that openness, he made an intelligent judgment. Would that all legislators could do that on every issue--both Democrats and Republicans.”

Rogan’s judicial approach to legislation, his easy humor and his friendly banter have kindled rare bipartisan warmth--with even Democratic Speaker Willie Brown taking time out from battling the Republican tide to express fondness for the man he calls “The Judge.”

And though he professes to be a right-wing conservative, Rogan has either passed up chances to voice strident rhetoric or the year may not have afforded many opportunities for him to show those stripes.

But Rogan, 37, is not through surprising his fellow legislators. He may even alienate some of them before too long.

At the risk of losing a share of the popularity points he’s won so far in the Assembly, Rogan is embarking on a crusade to challenge and revamp the way the Legislature does business.

The status quo, as he sees it, is “appalling.”

Boiled down to its essence, Rogan’s complaint is of too many bills and too little time to study them. “I think we have an obligation if we’re going to write laws to at least know what’s in them and what they do before we cast votes on them,” said Rogan.

On Monday in the Assembly Rules Committee, Rogan will launch his first vessel of reform, a controversial measure to slash in half the number of proposed new laws that legislators can introduce.

Then, in four other resolutions, he plans to push new rules to prevent 11th-hour shenanigans by lawmakers who try to shimmy special-interest bills past unwitting, harried colleagues. Last, he is co-authoring a measure with Republican Leader Jim Brulte of Rancho Cucamonga to require power sharing between the Democrats and the Republicans.

Assembly members are currently limited to 50 bills and state senators to 65 in each two-year session. Rogan would cap those numbers at 25 and 30. Resolutions, constitutional amendments, state budget bills and measures to repeal laws would remain unrestricted under his proposal.

Though he’s a die-hard, less-is-more Republican, Rogan said his quest stems more from a belief that the Assembly is waterlogged with bills than from a philosophical quibble with churning out more regulation. Either way, it achieves a key GOP aim of trimming back government.

“The problem is, when you have 6,600 bills coming through the Legislature in a two-year session, we get into this period where they are literally being jammed through without any time to reflect or contemplate what’s in them,” Rogan said.

“It’s just no way for legislation to be crafted. It leaves all kinds of opportunity for mischief.”

After Rogan snatched up the 43rd Assembly District seat left vacant when Pat Nolan pleaded guilty to political corruption charges, the joke was that The Judge had got it all backward.

Speaker Brown, taking aim at the newcomer from his massive, imposing desk at the head of the ornate Assembly, teased the former jurist that most of the folks in the room aspired to judicial appointments, not the other way around.

But Rogan had yearned for politics since he was a boy, and so he couldn’t resist when he was approached to run during Nolan’s bittersweet farewell to supporters at the Burbank Holiday Inn last spring.

Now, some community leaders figure Rogan’s hometown popularity, mirroring the reception he’s gotten in Sacramento, may have surpassed that of Nolan, his seasoned Republican predecessor and friend.

“He’s gotten immediate acceptance,” said Bob Hauter, a businessman who is close to Nolan. “Jim is more right-wing, but what he has managed to do is reach out to Pat’s supporters and get an even broader base of support.”

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Former Lt. Gov. Bob Finch, a pillar of the local political establishment, said he’s been taken with Rogan’s energy and articulateness since counseling him years ago in a switch from the Democratic to the Republican Party.

“I was very happy to have a protege with his skills,” said Finch, who helped steer Rogan toward a judgeship and performed the swearing-in when he won an appointment to Glendale’s Municipal Court. “My admiration for him is quite high. He has a passion for public service.”

That passion was evident as early as the seventh grade, when Rogan corresponded with a former U. S. President, namely Harry S. Truman, whom he chose as the subject of his first school research paper.

In an April article in Reader’s Digest to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Truman’s first swearing-in, Rogan wrote about the thrill of receiving two letters written by Truman on his personal letterhead: “This was pretty heady stuff for a 12-year-old boy.”

Before long, Rogan was amassing a vast collection of letters, campaign buttons, signed photographs and historical memorabilia. Today, his office walls are covered floor to ceiling with autographed pictures of political giants, including Presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Many are personally dedicated to Rogan, who is pictured alongside the history-makers of his day.

Rogan’s feverish boyhood pursuit of correspondence--and later, the collectibles--may have provided a needed distraction from a childhood that included years of hardship.

Rogan worked the tough times to his advantage. Last year’s campaign literature laid out an extensive biography of him, under the header “From the Streets to the Courthouse.”

The brochure opened with: “Jim Rogan’s life as a child was marred by fractures and pain. As a young boy, Jim never knew his real father. His stepfather was an alcoholic. His mother a convicted felon. He was raised by his grandparents.”

It wasn’t until Rogan was 12 years old that he lived with his mother, although he always knew her, and she lived upstairs from him for a time. His grandparents cared for him when he was little, he said, in a loving if modest working-class San Francisco household. His grandfather, a longshoreman, died when he was 7; his grandmother died 1 1/2 years later. He then went to live with a great-aunt until she died, sending him finally to his mother.

By that time, Rogan’s mother, who was young and unwed when Rogan was born, had been married several years to his stepfather and had four more children. She fled her alcoholic husband a couple of years later, leaving the family on shaky financial ground.

As a teen-ager, Rogan dropped out of school to work odd jobs, and remembers “my mom had a lot of run-ins with the law. She had been convicted, gone to jail, violated her probation and had to go back.”

He is not ashamed to tell the story, he said, and questions whether it had much of a role in shaping him one way or the other:

“We were on welfare, and she cheated or she misrepresented herself to get additional benefits or food stamps,” Rogan said. “It was a difficulty for the family but it didn’t last forever.

“I think if you are loved and, even if you’re poor, if you have friends in similar circumstances, you never feel like you are abused or that life is insurmountable,” Rogan said. “I never felt I had a hard childhood, but as I got older, people said to me, ‘Boy, you overcame a lot!’ ”

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Rogan was drawn to politics, he said, because as a boy he cherished American history. As he grew older, though, he began to view it as a place where one could achieve heights in spite of one’s background.

“What dawned on me is that through the political process, it really didn’t matter what kind of background one came from. Political history is covered by people from very humble means,” Rogan said. “Upon reflection, that may have been part of the attraction.”

Though he never finished high school, Rogan enrolled in a community college before transferring to and graduating from UC Berkeley. He earned his law degree at UCLA.

Rogan moved to Glendale and ended up marrying a woman who lived in the same apartment building, upstairs from him. He and his wife, Chris, have twin daughters, Claire and Dana, 2 1/2. After working for a couple of years as a corporate lawyer, Rogan became a prosecutor.

Rogan said that, after a period of soul-searching, he shunned the party that his grandparents’ blue-collar household had embraced. He was a member of the Los Angeles County Democratic Central Committee when he decided it had become too liberal, and he too conservative.

After switching parties, Rogan applied for and won a judicial appointment in 1990 from Gov. George Deukmejian.

At 33, Rogan became the youngest sitting judge in California and was prepared to stay there awhile. “I really loved my work on the bench and was in no hurry to give it up,” Rogan said.

In winning election to the Legislature, Rogan has not left behind the deliberative thought processes he cultivated as a judge. That has impressed his colleagues.

Rogan and Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) are about as far apart as lawmakers can get on the political ideology spectrum. Rogan opposes gun control, abortion rights, welfare entitlements and votes a straight Chamber of Commerce ticket. He supported Proposition 187’s crackdown on services for illegal immigrants and co-authored last year’s “paddling” bill to spank graffiti scribblers. In his campaign, he received significant contributions from the conservative Allied Business PAC, a coalition to boost business-oriented candidates from the Christian right.

Kuehl, the first openly gay member of the Legislature, is a pioneer of liberal Democratic principles. Yet Kuehl appreciates Rogan as “a reasonable man.”

“He listens. When he discusses bills, he often takes a very reasoned approach,” said Kuehl. “He’ll come over to ask for your vote and argue the sensibility of the bill. I like a member who approaches the matter as though it has some intellectual content.”

But Kuehl is not clamoring to join Rogan’s legislative reform bandwagon. She is not alone in her view that legislators are sent to Sacramento for a purpose--to legislate.

“We are engaged in nothing less than stewardship of the entire California statutory agenda,” Kuehl noted. “There are millions of issues that our individual constituents have, so I seriously disagree with Jim’s attempt to limit the number of bills.”

Rogan may get a friendlier reception for his argument that lawmakers are on information overload from fellow Republicans who believe they need to show their support for him.

Republican Leader Brulte, for one, is in Rogan’s corner on the question of keeping new legislation to a minimum. “It will force legislators to think and seriously consider the bills before them,” he said.

When he’s not attacking the institution, Rogan wins over allies with humor or practical jokes. Recently he switched his official legislative portrait with that of Democratic Assemblywoman Grace Napolitano of Norwalk, whose picture now hangs in his office with a sign that says “Proud to vote Republican.” Napolitano retaliated by adorning Rogan’s photo in her office with a sign that says “James Rogan, proud member of the California Women’s Caucus, California Latino Caucus, Affirmative Action Caucus and No on 187 Caucus.”

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Rogan also has the distinction of adding perhaps the best new “it’s a small world” story to current Capitol lore.

One recent day, he presented Democratic Assemblyman John Burton with an old “McGovern for President” campaign button. He retold the tale of how, as a determined, 13-year-old memorabilia collector, young Rogan stopped candidate Burton, blocked his path and refused to budge until Burton gave him the button on his lapel.

Today, Burton recalls that he did stumble across “a cute kid” under such circumstances at a 1971 San Francisco political rally.

The story doesn’t end there. While he was running for the Assembly, Rogan’s long-lost father got in touch with him and wanted to establish paternity. Tests came back positive, and Rogan’s newly confirmed father mentioned he should look up a good friend of his in Sacramento.

That turned out to be Burton, who decades ago worked in a San Francisco tavern where Rogan’s mother was a cocktail waitress and Rogan’s father the bartender.

Of Rogan, Burton said: “He’s a very decent, bright and able young man, albeit misguided in his political philosophy. At one time he was a decent Democrat, but he must have fallen on his head--and that’s what made him a right-wing Republican.”

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Profile of James E. Rogan

Born: Aug. 21, 1957, in San Francisco

Home: Glendale

Family: Married to Christine; two daughters, twins Claire and Dana, 2 1/2.

Education: UC Berkeley, B.A.; UCLA School of Law, J.D.

Career: Attorney, 1983-85; L.A. County deputy district attorney, 1985-90. Glendale Municipal Court judge, 1990-1994.

Elected: May, 1994, to the state Assembly representing the 43rd District, which includes Burbank, Glendale and parts of Los Angeles.

Last Book Read: Mason’s Manual of Legislative Procedures

Last Movie Seen: “Snow White,” with his daughters.

Hobbies: Since age 9, an avid collector of political memorabilia.

Favorite piece in his collection: Letters from former President Harry S. Truman written to Rogan when he was 12.

Favorite political biography: Theodore Roosevelt’s memoirs.

Other treasured pieces: Hand-written political quotation from Hubert Humphrey dedicated to Rogan in 1968 when he was 11; 1940 Missouri campaign poster with Franklin D. Roosevelt for President and Truman for senator.