Bustamante Begins Historic Speakership

Amid references to history in the making, the California Assembly on Monday elected Democrat Cruz Bustamante as speaker, the first Latino to attain that powerful post, while the Senate quickly reelected Bill Lockyer as its leader.

With Democrats back in control of the Assembly, Bustamante, a Fresno moderate, won with the votes of all 43 Democrats in the 80-member house. Former Speaker Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove), who lost the post as a result of the Democratic victories in November, received the votes of the 37 Republicans.

Bustamante vowed to make the lower house a “battleground of ideas.”

At the same time, he said he wants to limit the partisan fighting that marred the last two years, when Republicans held a bare majority and Democrats spent much of the session blocking the GOP from seizing control.

“I challenge the house to do good,” Bustamante said in accepting the post as his wife, Arcelia, three children, parents and several other family members looked on.

Bustamante quickly exercised his new power, naming Assemblywoman Sheila J. Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) as speaker pro tem, making her responsible for presiding over Assembly floor sessions. She is the first woman and the first openly gay member to serve in the post.

“No woman has done this before, so this is an honor for me,” said Kuehl, who was viewed as a top competitor for the speakership. “I plan to work very hard to prove that a woman can, in fact, keep order in the house.”

In the Senate, Lockyer was reelected with far less fanfare to his second term as president pro tem. The vote was 36 to 0 in the 40-member house. Senate Republican Leader Rob Hurtt of Garden Grove abstained, as did two other Republicans. Sen. William A. Craven (R-Oceanside) was absent.

Like Bustamante, Lockyer (D-Hayward) said welfare reform will be a major issue when the Legislature returns in January.

Republican Gov. Pete Wilson and the Democrat-dominated Legislature must “somehow blend the doctrines of personal responsibility, market discipline and our gracious instincts to help those who need help the most,” Lockyer said.

But the focus of the day was on Bustamante, 43, who was born in the small San Joaquin Valley farm town of Dinuba and is in his third and final term. In their nominating speeches, Democrats repeatedly cited the importance of what they were about to do.

“Today, we climb a little higher because we elect a Latino the speaker of this house,” Assemblywoman Valerie Brown (D-Kenwood) said. Latino children will learn that “if they try a little harder, stay a little more in school, then maybe [they] can too . . . can be like Cruz Bustamante.”

“The doors are open. He’ll be our pioneer,” said Assemblyman Joe Baca (D-San Bernardino), who spoke in Spanish for a time during his floor speech about the importance of electing Bustamante as speaker.

For Bustamante, it was a triumphant moment, one marked by the attendance of more than two dozen family members and many friends. Bustamante said his election meant that the American dream of his grandparents, immigrants from Mexico, “came true.”

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His father, a retired barber also named Cruz, said the occasion was a time of great pride.

Sitting beside his wife, Dominga, in the ornate Assembly chambers, the elder Bustamante said: “You work hard to bring your kids up right, and to see them get here means a lot. That’s my boy up there. He’ll do a good job.”

In his acceptance speech, Bustamante referred to issues dear to a wide variety of special interests that support Democrats, from labor and the education lobby to trial lawyers. He also said that he believes that the state can be run without raising taxes.

Bustamante noted that he spoke to a fifth-grade class in Sacramento on Monday morning, telling them that although he is “a little overweight, a little bald, old” and came from humble beginnings, he was proof that hard work can pay off.

“I told them it doesn’t matter where you’re from, or how many vowels are in your parents’ names,” he said. “What matters, I told them, is that you believe in yourself, practice, that you work hard and study hard.”

Bustamante said one of his top priorities will be to establish a committee to push for a University of California campus in the San Joaquin Valley, an area that sends relatively few high school graduates to the UC system.

The move will cheer his home district but also underscores Bustamante’s desire to ensure that there is space in college for any high school graduate who has the grades and wants to attend college.

Bustamante also pledged to fire as early as this week four members of the California Coastal Commission named by Pringle. He said he will replace them with “people who have good environmental credentials, but understand that we have an entrepreneurial spirit that cannot be stifled totally.”

Bustamante said several times that he intends to work with Republicans.

Pringle, who Monday was still clearing out of the speaker’s quarters that he occupied for less than a year, was among the first to congratulate Bustamante. He joined the new speaker on the dais.

However, in the first vote with Bustamante as speaker, Pringle led Republicans in abstaining from supporting new rules by which the house will operate for the next two years, warning that the rules signal “the return of the imperial speakership” made famous by longtime Assembly leader Willie Brown, who was in attendance Monday.

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As for the selection of Kuehl as speaker pro tem, Pringle and other Republicans noted that, in the past, speakers pro tem have been elected. He contended that Bustamante changed the rules to duck a vote on Kuehl and avoid a floor fight.

Bustamante denied it, saying it was not unusual. “I picked the person who I thought was the most talented and who knew the rules the best, and that was Sheila Kuehl,” Bustamante said.

As is tradition on the day when new members are sworn in, lawmakers brought spouses, parents and children into the chambers. Once the Legislature elected its leaders, lawmakers set out for a night of receptions hosted by various special interests.

More than a third of the lawmakers, including several freshmen, were making final plans for fund-raisers this month, before fund-raising limits approved by voters Nov. 5 take hold at the first of the year.

“Are we going to have a fund-raiser before Dec. 31? Yeah, hopefully, one or two,” Bustamante said.

Assemblywoman Debra Bowen (D-Marina del Rey) is another who will hold fund-raisers this month, noting that Assemblyman Dick Floyd (D-Wilmington), her probable opponent for a potential state Senate run in 1998, is planning his own fund-raiser.

“He’s doing it, so I have to,” Bowen said.

The new Senate arrives with 23 Democrats and 16 Republicans, with an independent. There are 10 freshman senators, although nine of them are former Assembly members. In the Assembly, five of the 32 freshmen previously served in the lower house.

Among the scores of onlookers at Monday’s session were former lawmakers, who seemed somewhat wistful as they watched members of the new Assembly class take oaths of office.

“I would have been buried right up there,” former Speaker Willie Brown said, pointing to the speaker’s podium.

Even as they were being sworn in, many legislators were hoping that term limits, approved by voters in 1990, would be declared unconstitutional. The law bans them from remaining in the Assembly for more than six years and in the Senate for more than eight years.

Times staff writers Eric Bailey, Carl Ingram and Jenifer Warren contributed to this story.