The Mouth That Roars the Loudest : Capital: Even among the iconoclasts and ideologues in the Assembly, Diane Martinez stands out. San Gabriel Valley representative is scorned and praised for her combative approach.

She breaks rules. She feuds with other legislators--same party, same gender. She hammers witnesses at legislative hearings, suspecting they lie.

Even her casual bantering with reporters betrays an instinctive distrust: “I know what you guys are doing. You’re waiting for one of us to say something funny or stupid.”

So says Diane Martinez, Democrat from the east San Gabriel Valley who defied her congressman-father to get here and is serving a third year in the Assembly--as combative and naysaying as ever, the bad-mouth laureate of the California Legislature.

In an Assembly so full of iconoclasts and ideologues that consensus often drowns in acrimony, Martinez still stands out. In recent weeks even her home county of Los Angeles has not been spared her sharp tongue in discussions about the county’s handling of its huge budget problems.

Recalling a meeting between county officials and lawmakers about possible solutions, “As soon as you get close to discussing something that might cause them a little discomfort, they did a little sidestep like the dance the guy did in ‘The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.’ ”

Never let anyone yell at you without yelling back, or you’ll always be yelled at, she postulates.

So it was, she said, that as a freshman she went at it nose to nose with a senior Democratic legislator, John Burton of San Francisco, in a back room full of other lawmakers over money to pay staff. Moments later she went up against powerful Speaker Willie Brown, brazenly critiquing his methods--all on her first day in Sacramento.

She had arrived in 1993 from her hometown of Monterey Park having survived some rough patches from the years since she and her two sisters and two brothers stuffed campaign envelopes for their father--Democratic U.S. Rep. Matthew G. Martinez--during his early political career.

Beginning a college career at East Los Angeles College, she dropped out after a year and a half to begin a marriage that fell apart seven years later, after the birth of her daughter, Kate.

When the call came from a political mentor advising her to run again for the Assembly--she had lost two years before--Martinez took the call on a cellular telephone while standing in the unemployment line, “probably looking like a drug dealer.”

Her hard edge, she said in an interview while sitting on the floor of her office with her shoes off, was honed early and kept that way on purpose, derived from a simple principle: “I hate politics,” specifically double-talk, lying and “knee-jerk philosophy.”

If her colleagues “think I’m erratic and get upset with me,” she said, it does not matter. “It wasn’t them that elected me to come here.”

Others agree that “Miss Congeniality”--as she is mockingly called by several colleagues--has not changed her ways, as upstart newcomers tend to do along the path of political least resistance.

Speaking on condition she not be named, a fellow Democrat recounted recent instances of Martinez ordering colleagues out of her office, storming out of the offices of others and hanging up on legislators in the middle of phone conversations.

So intense are her clashes with Assemblywoman Debra Bowen (D-Marina del Rey), Bowen said last week, “Some people have suggested we put our fighting to good use by holding a mud wrestling fund-raiser and donating the proceeds to the Democratic Party.”

At legislative hearings, Martinez bores into witnesses she suspects of slanting the facts, often with a meltdown of decorum. Once, at a consumer protection committee hearing on a bill relating to closed-caption films for the deaf, Martinez pressed on with the cross-examination of a witness, ignoring requests to stick to the agreed-upon time limit.

Finally, Bowen, who was chairing the session, silenced Martinez by cutting the power to her microphone.

Last month during prolonged budget debates, the presiding Assembly officer ordered the house under lock to force a vote--a rare inviolable act requiring sergeants-at-arms to guard the doors and let no member leave.

To cries of “Stop her!” from a senior official, Martinez ignored the order, walking past befuddled guards and on to her office. No serious budget business was taking place, Martinez explained, “so, like drugs, I just said no.”

Though an upholder of the party’s social ideals and the Latino legislative agenda, Martinez gets at crossways with Democrats at least as often as with Republicans.

One member of the GOP legislative leadership, speaking on condition he not be named, said Republicans “tend to tune her out” as she rises to speak on the Assembly floor.

Martinez, 42, is fine-featured and 5-foot-2, with dark eyes and hair she tells her hairdresser to “cut short and make it look professional in 10 minutes.” She is chairwoman of the Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee and is considered an expert on utilities issues, stemming from 17 years working for communications companies.

It hurt, she said, to have been reviled as just about the worst legislator in Sacramento by the insider magazine California Journal a year ago. But it doesn’t hurt anymore.

“I just think of it as the California Urinal,” she says now--and goes right on hammering, questioning and pursuing her unblinking, widely unappreciated vision.

Most of the outrages she tells on herself.

In a 1993 committee hearing face-off with fellow Democrat and then-Senate leader David A. Roberti, she claims she rattled him over his bill that would have led to the breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School District, and “I really enjoyed the process.”

Fueling the fire, she then impugned Roberti’s Italian heritage--unknowingly, she said--by remarking he was “acting like a godfather” by holding up her bills in the Senate. Laughing about it in an interview, Martinez noted that Roberti announced publicly that “I should have my mouth washed out with soap.”

“I never apologized,” she said, but she did send flowers.

Roberti, now a member of the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, did not return phone calls for this article.

True, Martinez said, she had more than once shattered the decorum of a legislative proceeding, usually by relentless, prolonged questioning of witnesses--and so what, she said, as long as the truth emerges. “Sometimes there is a method to my madness.”

In one such “dance with people” at an Education Committee session over bilingual education, Martinez said that by persistent questioning she got a mother of a white child to expose her real objections to the program: “I told her, ‘You just don’t want your child to be in a class where there are non-English speaking students.’ I said it to her three times.”

Her methods had exposed racism, Martinez said, “that was shocking.”

Martinez has her defenders and accomplishments. In a random survey of more than a dozen legislators:

* Assemblywoman Martha Escutia (D-Huntington Park): “I think the world of Diane . . . a real neat lady.” A bill Martinez orchestrated to allow women to wear pants to work represented Martinez at her best. On that, and a freeway bill of interest to Martinez’s district, “she was awesome. I told her she made me proud as a Latino woman.”

* Sen. Bill Leonard (R-San Bernardino): On a Public Utilities Commission restructuring bill he was pushing and she opposed, “I thought her questions were good ones, neither too many or too lengthy.”

* Assemblyman Burton, with whom she clashed on Day 1 in the Assembly: “She’s very bright . . . cares a lot about issues. She’s volatile but so am I. To me that’s a good characteristic.”

* Assemblyman Kevin Murray (D-Los Angeles): “She drove me crazy” once by appearing unscheduled from the wings to oppose a bill he was presenting in committee. But she’s “straight with you and generally doesn’t hold a grudge, and neither do I.”

* Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica): “She is very intelligent, very quick to spot the flaw in a bill . . . that others have not seen. She’s not a centrist. She’s not a consensus builder. She’s the critic. She values that in herself, and I value her, in that role.”

Like her father, Martinez said she entered politics to fight it. Diane Martinez said she had no urge to seek elective office until the day she blew up at an “arrogant” member of the Garvey School Board. In conclusion, she recalled saying, “And I’ll tell you something else, buddy. You’re sitting in my seat”--prophetic words, it turned out.

Martinez served on that school board for five years before making her first run for the Assembly in 1990. She lost, and blamed her father for his advice, supervision and his decision to use the Howard Berman-Henry Waxman political organization to run her campaign.

People familiar with that campaign said that Berman-Waxman had a distinctly uncooperative candidate on their hands who defeated herself, but Martinez tells it differently. She said that as a woman she was “expected to be seen and not heard” by handlers “who didn’t know my community.”

Come 1992--and victory--she proclaimed things would be done her way: No Berman-Waxman, no father calling the shots. Now it would be her, her sister Susie Baker, Democratic consultant Richie Ross and lawn signs painted “ninja mutant turtle green and purple.”

She said she told her father, “With all due respect, I’m going my own way on this one, and we did. We didn’t use him on anything. If people didn’t know he was my father already, they weren’t going to know him [now].”

She said excluding her father from the campaign hurt him, leaving to this day a residue of “strangeness” between them.

Though not the norm in Latino families, Matthew Martinez said it should not be surprising for a child to defy the parent.

“As they get older they change, though. And then one day, it’s very gratifying, they come to you and say, ‘Dad, you were right. I really didn’t see it that way when you told me but now I do.’ ”

With Diane, he said, “I find solace in that someday that’ll happen.”