Republicans Acting as if Willie Brown Is Still in Charge

A GOP assemblyman indicted; two other Republicans recalled; one denied renomination; a Republican speaker under investigation. Why after consolidating their surprise capture of the Assembly in 1994 are Republicans scrambling to hold on to their power? It’s as if Willie Brown was still in Sacramento and not the new mayor of San Francisco.

Indeed, years of paranoia over their treatment at the hands of Brown, coupled with their own legislative inexperience, lie at the heart of the California GOP’s failure, so far, to govern effectively.

Because of Brown, two of the 41 Republicans elected to the Assembly in 1994 have been recalled, and a third has been driven into exile. But if Republicans have been paranoid over Brown, they have had much to be paranoid about. In 1995, Brown and his fellow Democrats used extra-constitutional parliamentary tricks that would have shamed a banana-republic dictator to maintain themselves in power for an extra year. This included electing two renegade Republicans as Assembly speaker, which so unsettled the Assembly that it has been effectively ungovernable ever since.

Last January, the GOP Assembly caucus finally marshaled enough votes to elect their own speaker, Orange County’s Curt Pringle, suggesting that the party had finally gotten its act together. But whatever advantage Republicans enjoyed then, they have largely thrown away in the intervening months.

Assembly Republicans promised an agenda along the lines of the national party’s “contract with America.” But the first Republican bills out of the box would have prohibited gay marriages; allowed motorcyclists to cast off their helmets, and permitted paddling of schoolchildren. This was not quite the agenda they were sent to Sacramento to enact. The same caucus that recoils at teachers discussing sex in the classroom seemed to favor allowing them to whip the children instead.

This legislative “introduction,” which served to drown out the passage of more substantive GOP-sponsored bills, was dismissed as the exuberance of inexperience. But it also underscored a problem that has plagued the state Republican Party ever since it came to power: an inability to govern, along with a brittle ideological approach to politics. While legislative Democrats grew corrupt and arrogant from being in power too long, Republicans became unnecessarily vindictive and inflexible from being too long out of power.

Republicans, so far, lack fullness of political character, the kind of sophistication and nuance so crucial to political choreography in California. There are no beguiling politicians among their leaders; their harsh ideological edge invites their adversaries to give them no breaks when they stumble. A capital media that was in awe of Brown largely finds them dour dunderheads who prefer the club to the stiletto and who delight in driving wedges among their own supporters. Consider the ouster of Assemblyman Brian Setencich, the last GOP speaker installed by Brown. In a fit of vengeance, party leaders helped an Orange County political operation known as the Independent Business PAC launch a sneak attack to defeat him in his Fresno district primary.

Republicans were so ham-handed about Setencich that they both drove away their 41st vote needed to govern and nominated a recently arrived carpetbagger from Southern Californian, thus endangering a seat they desperately need to hold in November to maintain their slim Assembly majority.

Setencich voted with the GOP on most issues and will be around at least another eight months. But short of his 41st vote, Republicans lack enough reliable votes to guarantee passage of their bills. Speaker Pringle will thus be weakened when negotiating with his Senate counterpart, Democratic President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer, who does control enough votes to ram legislation through his chamber.

Here Republicans might have learned from Brown. The former Assembly speaker would have taken Setencich into a back room and beat him about the head and shoulders until he agreed to cooperate, but he would never have sacrificed the vote he needed to govern.

Instead, the driving force--from top party officials to the young conservative ideologues--has been to punish and purify rather than to govern.

One could argue that today’s young operatives who populate the Assembly legislative staffs are a right-wing version of ‘60s radicals. They come to government every bit as unbending, contemptuous of compromise and devoid of common sense as their ‘60s counterparts.

And it gets them into trouble. In the strange affair of Scott Baugh, the Assembly GOP caucus faces a scandal that could topple it. Determined to oust Orange County Assembly Speaker Doris Allen for making a “deal” with Brown and to win undisputed control of the Assembly, Republican operatives placed a Democratic supporter of Baugh’s on the ballot as a decoy to split Democratic votes in the recall election. Striving to split an opponent’s votes is neither illegal, nor, frankly, improper. In the March primary, Democrats sought to help weak Republicans win two close state Senate primaries, and actually succeeded in one. But in the Baugh case, young GOP campaign workers tried to hide their handiwork, and committed a crime.

Last month, now-Assemblyman Baugh was indicted in the plot, and the clouds of scandal gathered over Pringle’s office. Meantime, the Republican reactions have only made matters worse. Baugh claimed tax-and-spend liberals were out to get him, and Pringle has stonewalled the whole affair. Republicans thus face the possibility that Baugh will either be forced to resign or be convicted, raising the possibility that a Democrat may take over his safe Republican district.

All this leads Sacramento political observers, lobbyists and campaign financiers to wonder if the Republicans can maintain their majority through the 1996 elections. They should wonder. Last month, state Senate Republicans lost a special election in a San Francisco Peninsula district they had held for 12 years. The Democrats’ rallying cry was Orange County right-wing extremism. Indications are Republican voters defected to help the Democrat win.

The greatest danger legislative Republicans face is the lack of any positive record. Barbara Tuchman once wrote that it mattered not to the Chinese peasant when the Americans were thrown out of China in 1949, because, for them, the Americans had never been there. Republicans should guard against that same fate at the hands of California voters this fall.*