GOP Moderate Touted by Democrats for Speaker’s Job : Politics: Doris Allen has emerged as a possible Brown replacement. Some Republicans dislike her bipartisanship.

For 13 arduous years, Assemblywoman Doris Allen has toiled mostly in the shadows of the Legislature. But these days the Cypress Republican is emerging as a key player as the GOP and Democrats gird for yet another duel over who will become the next Speaker of the Assembly.

With a special election next week expected to give Republicans a slim majority of seats in the Assembly, Allen has become the unlikely first choice among many Democrats for the top post. A chorus of Democrat legislators are voicing interest in the candidacy of the Republican veteran, saying she represents the best hope for them to retain a bipartisan toehold in the lower house.

“The attractiveness of Doris Allen offering herself up like this is that she wants to be bipartisan, she isn’t interested in settling old scores and wants to move this place in a bipartisan manner,” said Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar). “But like anything else around here, nothing is done until it’s done. I don’t know that Doris has it together yet.”

The GOP is expected to gain a 40-39 edge over Democrats in a special election next week to fill former Republican Assemblyman Richard Mountjoy’s seat. Mountjoy, of Arcadia, is now in the state Senate. But if the Democrats can put together a 39-vote bloc behind a single Republican candidate that they find palatable, they could determine who would replace longtime Democrat Assembly Speaker Willie Brown.

Brown, who is expected to announce this weekend that he will run for mayor of San Francisco, has said he would step aside as soon as another member puts together 40 votes to replace him.

During her tenure in the Assembly, Allen has gotten a reputation among Democrats as a moderate who can occasionally be counted on for a vote, unlike many of her more ideologically rigid Republican colleagues. Allen has often sided with the Democrats on increased education funding and was part of a bipartisan team that put together environmental reforms that proved palatable to liberals.

Allen, 59, is a divorced mother of two grown children who made her first foray into politics as a school board member in Orange County before vaulting to the Assembly in 1982. Under the state term limits law, she must leave office in 1996.

Allen’s effort to woo Democrats has raised the hackles of many of her Republican colleagues, who believe that her candidacy would deny the GOP what one official called the party’s “manifest destiny” to eventually seize control of the Legislature’s lower house.

The leading candidate has been Republican Assembly Leader Jim Brulte of Rancho Cucamonga. Allen has said her candidacy was motivated in large part by her anger over slights by Brulte and other GOP leaders, most notably their backing of Allen’s Republican opponent when she ran unsuccessfully for a vacant Orange County state Senate seat this year.

Republicans won a one-seat majority in November’s election, but failed to gain the speakership when GOP Assemblyman Paul Horcher bolted the party and cast his vote for Brown. Angry over Horcher’s vote for Brown, voters in his Diamond Bar-based district recalled him two weeks ago, leaving the Assembly with an equal number of Democrats and Republicans and two vacancies. One of those will be filled next week, while a second special election in a heavily Republican district in Orange County will not go before the electorate until midsummer.

The new bipartisan rules in the Assembly, hatched during the speakership tug of war this year, has resulted in Republicans and Democrats sharing an equal number of committee chairmanships, committee assignments and staff funding. But after years under the thumb of Brown and the Democrats, many Republicans would prefer to throw out the bipartisan rules, stacking committees with a majority of GOP members.

That’s the sort of reign of terror that Democrats are eager to avoid.

“It will depend on who can offer us the most stability, on who we can trust,” said Assemblyman Kevin Murray (D-Los Angeles). “We want to be protected in a true power-sharing relationship.”

Democrats said the fight goes beyond gamesmanship to deep-rooted beliefs that split the two parties on issues such as gun control, abortion and the environment.

“What I have heard from the Republicans is that they want to change the rules immediately, and that worries me a lot,” said Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica). “There is a deeper battle going on. That battle isn’t about partisanship or politics, it’s about ideology. From that perspective, Doris Allen isn’t a bad choice. She’ll keep the rules, which means we have a shot at having our ideology reflected.”

Republicans, meanwhile, might simply bide their time until late in the year, when they hope to gain firm control of the Assembly by capturing the seat vacated by Republican Ross Johnson, who moved to the state Senate last month, and staging a successful recall of Democrat Assemblyman Michael J. Machado of Linden.