GOP Escalates Fight Against New Speaker : Politics: Party coalition announces support of recall drive against Doris Allen. Two Assembly allies quit key posts.

Republicans escalated their fight against Assembly Speaker Doris Allen on Tuesday as a coalition of GOP county chairmen announced their support for a recall of the embattled lawmaker, and two allies abandoned her.

Support of the recall by the GOP County Chairmen’s Assn. boosted the effort to dethrone Allen (R-Cypress), who ascended to the speakership last week with the backing of the Assembly’s 39 Democrats.

The group was responsible for amassing the bulk of the volunteer army that helped push through a successful recall of GOP maverick Paul Horcher last month--and they promised to do the same with Allen.

“Ms. Allen has betrayed the Republican Party and her Republican principles by becoming nothing more than a stooge for Assemblyman Willie Brown and the Assembly Democrats,” Craig K. Powell, president of the GOP association, said in a memo to Republican legislators.

Allen got more bad news as two Republican lawmakers she had counted on for support rejected plum assignments from the new Speaker.

Assemblyman Jan Goldsmith (R-Poway), who chaired a rancorous meeting Monday and was slated to be Allen’s second-in-command as Speaker pro tem, said he would reject the position. Meanwhile, Assemblyman Bob Margett (R-Arcadia), a newly elected freshman whom Allen had appointed just last week to the powerful Rules Committee, stepped down from the post under pressure from conservative peers.

Margett found that other Republicans were highly critical of his decision to take the post, which he assumed after Allen had dumped Assemblyman Fred Aguiar (R-Chino) from the committee when Aguiar made it clear that he would not support the new Speaker on key issues.

“I wasn’t informed that the Republican Caucus had made a rule, an understanding, that you don’t bump another Republican,” Margett said. “I’m not going to sell out my caucus.”

But Margett said he intends to remain out of the Allen recall fight, adding, “I want to bring her back into the Republican fold.”

Adding to an already tough day for Allen, Goldsmith sent her a letter relaying that he would no longer preside over Assembly sessions, leaving doubt about who will run the lower house when it reconvenes Thursday.

Goldsmith said he had agreed to preside on Monday, hoping that he could support Republicans who are critical of Allen but also run a smooth and fair Assembly floor session. During and after the Monday session, however, other Republicans turned their anger toward him, and pressured him to refuse to take up the gavel in future sessions.

“The perception given was that I’m in her camp,” Goldsmith said, adding that most of the GOP lawmakers “thought that no Republican should accept the gavel.”

Freshman Assemblyman Brian Setencich (R-Fresno), one of Allen’s two remaining Republican supporters, said he spoke briefly with the Speaker about the possibility that he might run the next floor session on Thursday.

But Setencich also was under intense pressure. He estimated that 20 GOP lawmakers called or dropped by his office Tuesday, most of them trying to get him to peel away from the new Speaker.

“My word is good. My word is to move a Republican agenda, and I think we can do it with Doris as Speaker,” Setencich said. “Real pressure is not being able to feed the family. To me, this is the right thing. I’m working for the people who elected me.”

With Allen under siege Tuesday, her staff painted an upbeat picture of a new Speaker trying to get beyond politics and begin focusing on important policy questions facing the state.

“We’re going to go on and build a positive team for the Republican Party and the citizens of California,” said Keith Welch, Allen’s spokesman.

Welch was quick to criticize back-room efforts by Allen opponents to dispatch anonymous bulletins to the media filled with personal attacks on the new Speaker.

The new Speaker tried to rebound late in the day by announcing the addition of former Republican Assemblyman Gerald Felando as a senior adviser to her staff. Felando, a former Republican Caucus chairman, served 14 years in the Assembly until he was defeated in 1992.

Democrats, meanwhile, were clucking as they watched the Republicans turn on one of their own.

“What they ought to be doing is learning how to count and cleaning up their own mess,” Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) said of the continuing attacks on Allen. “It shows once again that the more extreme elements are in control of the Republican Party, and that they are out to purge anyone who does not march [in] lock-step with them.”

Katz raised the specter of the power struggle between Allen and her Republican colleagues spilling over into the debate over state help for bankrupt Orange County. With a sales tax increase to bail out the county doing badly in the polls and Wall Street firms attempting to block efforts to roll over the county’s debt of more than $1.7 billion, Allen may be the only person who can deliver Democrat votes to help, Katz suggested.

Republicans lawmakers, particularly those from Orange County, were not listening to any of it.

“Orange County legislators couldn’t stop this if we wanted to--and I don’t want to,” said state Sen. Ross Johnson (R-Irvine). “Doris has, by this deal she has struck with Willie Brown and the minority Democrats, gone against everything she stood for. She is thwarting the Republican agenda.”

But there was support this week in her hometown of Cypress, where the City Council unanimously passed a resolution Monday night praising Allen.

Councilwoman Gail H. Kerry, a Republican, made the motion. “Doris Allen has represented us well for many years, and to say she’s a puppet of anyone is ridiculous,” Kerry said. “I am tickled she beat the boys at their own game, and that we now have a woman as Speaker.” Allen’s opponents in Cypress, however, criticized the council’s action.

The biggest blow Tuesday may have been the GOP County Chairmen’s Assn. decision to support the recall. The group debated the issue Friday, and 43 of the 58 county GOP chairmen representing 93% of the Republican electorate were in attendance, Powell said.

In an interview, Powell said he expects the group to pull together at least 1,000 volunteers in the next few weeks to help gather signatures for a recall campaign against Allen.

“This is the grass-roots element of the party saying enough is enough,” Powell said.

Assemblyman Bernie Richter (R-Chico), the other Allen supporter and one of the most conservative GOP members in the Assembly, called the threatened recall of the Speaker a “murder-suicide pact.”

“I’m not sure they’ve thought out the potential consequences,” Richter said. “You could easily argue that it would take at least six months, cost $1 million we don’t have, lock us in a bitter, protracted fight. It would cast doubt on the budget. It would kill the governor’s program this year, and perhaps next year.”