Speakership Battle Leads to a Nasty Political Divorce

The recrimination, bitterness and anger are all there. This long, uneasy political marriage has turned to bitter divorce.

In the aftermath of GOP Assemblywoman Doris Allen’s ascent last month to her house’s top post on the shoulders of a unanimous bloc of Democrats, fellow Republicans up and down the state roared with anger. But none are more uniformly hostile than Allen’s colleagues from Orange County.

A clannish bunch linked by a solidly conservative vision of the world, the Orange County delegation for years abided Allen not so much as a part of the inner circle, but at least on its edge.

She voted with them and talked their conservative talk much of the time. In exchange, they sometimes offered campaign help.

But with her rise to the Assembly speakership amid charges that Allen is a puppet of longtime Democratic leader Willie Brown, the local legislators have thrown off any pretense of politeness.

The delegation’s members have become the engine powering a recall against Allen, pumping in money and whipping up the rank and file. They have also emerged as some of Allen’s most vitriolic inquisitors in an endless series of angry floor sessions.

Consider the case of Assemblyman Curt Pringle. A few years ago, Allen was comfortable enough with the Garden Grove Republican to attend his wedding. She also urged him to seek an Assembly seat. Pringle’s wife worked in her district office.

These days, Pringle is among her sharpest critics on the floor. During one testy exchange, an irate Allen ordered Pringle’s microphone shut off in mid-sentence. Afterward, she labeled him a malcontent, stripped him of a prime committee chairmanship and exiled him to Sacramento’s equivalent of the gulag--a cramped, two-room office poorly situated across from the noisy Capitol elevators.

More than anything, though, this sudden estrangement has opened the floodgates for years of pent-up irritation on the part of the delegation over Allen’s stubborn unwillingness to play the campaign game.

In the orthodoxy of the Orange County Republican Party, political tithing is expected, and Allen’s most consistent sin as an incumbent has been her unwillingness to open her own election coffers for needy colleagues around campaign time, delegation members grouse.

“Doris Allen has consistently been AWOL in the fight to gain a Republican majority,” said state Sen. John R. Lewis (R-Orange). “I can’t remember her lifting a finger to ever help another Republican.”

“Doris became, through the years, a taker,” added Thomas A. Fuentes, county GOP chairman. “She was used to taking, happy with taking, happy with being on the receiving end.”

Allen disputes such charges, saying she typically has had to concentrate on challengers in her own races. She recalls one year--1986--when she gave more than $20,000 to GOP candidates.

Such cash-register considerations aside, Allen has fought back by suggesting that many of her colleagues--as well as Republican Party kingpins such as Fuentes--are greedy power mongers who cannot stand the fact that she achieved a goal they failed to seize when it was within their grasp after the GOP’s startling Assembly election gains in 1994.

Before snatching the speakership with the help of Brown and the Democrats, Allen talked openly of her bitterness that Orange County’s Republican elite, as well as many of her Republican Assembly colleagues, backed GOP stalwart Ross Johnson over her in a state Senate primary last spring. (Fuentes, for one, argues that Allen’s late efforts to launch a campaign left her “barely a blip on the screen.”)

Johnson won, but Allen got the last laugh by vaulting to the speakership. She now lambastes Johnson, Pringle, Lewis and state Sen. Rob Hurtt (R-Garden Grove) as misguided political players intent on stomping anyone unwilling to follow their wishes.

“These guys are going for the power and the money,” Allen said. “It has nothing to do with Republicanism and what’s right for the state or country.”

She also says that Johnson, Pringle, Lewis and Hurtt have scared political consultants, contributors and GOP legislators away from her with thug-like suggestions that they will be frozen out in the future by the Republican Party.

But Allen does not appear scared. She has displayed her own willingness to fight, using the power of the speakership to punish members such Pringle and Assemblywoman Marilyn C. Brewer (R-Newport Beach).

Brewer, a moderate who would seem to be a ready-made ally to the new Speaker, has taken pains to align herself with the county’s conservatives since arriving in the Capitol. And the freshman has not hidden her distaste for Allen’s pact with the Democrats. Allen responded to Brewer’s public protests, which included vocal attempts to debunk allegations of GOP sexism against the Speaker, by dumping the freshman from the Assembly Rules Committee.

Meanwhile, the county’s three senators--Lewis, Johnson and Hurtt--are out of reach of Allen’s lash. But not her words.

Allen contends that Johnson “comes on the floor with disgraceful behavior.” She dismisses Lewis as a political dirty trickster more adept at whipping up the “young boys” of the party. She said Hurtt has displayed a big pocketbook in cultivating political followers, but rarely acts like the Christian gentleman he portrays himself to be on the campaign trail; she cites the poker parties he holds at his hotel suite in the Hyatt Regency across from the Capitol.

Several recent clashes are emblematic of the widening rift between Allen and her Orange County peers. Each one seems colored by the looming recall battle as well as years of simmering hostility gone to boil.

When Allen flew off to Colorado last week to be at the bedside of her ailing mother on the eve of a crucial affirmative action vote by the UC Board of Regents, several Republican colleagues from Orange County began sniping. Brewer questioned whether Allen had purposely ducked the vote because of pressure from the Assembly’s black and Latino caucuses.

Allen flatly rejected such notions and called her opponents “hardhearted” for suggesting that she was doing anything other than being a devoted daughter.

The Speaker and her Orange County brethren have also begun to tussle over solutions to the county’s drawn-out bankruptcy recovery. While the delegation has been working for weeks to draft its own relief effort, Allen in recent days has jumped into the fray and given every indication that she and her advisers will steer a different course.

Party elders such as Johnson suggest that the rift is not so much a product of past differences, but rather Allen’s “betrayal.”

“It would be wrong to interpret this as some kind of personality conflict between Doris and others in the Republican caucus,” Johnson said. “She hasn’t been treated differently than any other member. Members are judged on the contributions they make and the quality of what they offer to the process. I’ll leave it at that.”

Allen, of course, sees it differently. She has long felt slighted by the delegation. In some ways it seems ancient history. When she ran unsuccessfully in 1980, the GOP did a poll before the primary that indicated voters in the district preferred a man. Allen says it was a blatant attempt to hand the primary to her male opponent and blames Johnson for it; he says he had nothing to do with the poll.

Johnson says the party helped Allen in 1982, when she won. More important, Johnson and other GOP leaders wrote a letter to voters on Allen’s behalf blasting her prime challenger in a tight 1992 race that pitted three Republican incumbents in a newly drawn district. Allen went on to win by a slim margin over former Assemblyman Tom Mays, then a Huntington Beach Republican.

“If you’re totally punishing someone, writing a letter like that on their behalf isn’t something you do,” Lewis said. “If that group of Republicans hadn’t supported her, she wouldn’t be in office today.”