GOP Leader Pulls No Punches

Michael Schroeder, the chairman-to-be of the California Republican Party, is known for crushing his enemies.

One of those was Doris Allen, the former Cypress assemblywoman whose consignment to political oblivion Schroeder engineered when she broke ranks with the GOP leadership.

Then there was Paul Horcher, whose political career Schroeder helped scuttle when the Diamond Bar Republican assemblyman supported a Democrat for speaker.

And then there’s the woman Schroeder’s company sued in a business dispute and whom Schroeder asked a judge to jail, if necessary, to force her to turn over documents.

The woman is Dessa Schroeder, Michael’s mother. The case, which takes up 27 volumes in Orange County Superior Court, is on hold pending an appeal.

“Yeah, I have a reputation for playing hardball,” Schroeder said in an interview in his law office this week. “But I always play by the rules.”

This weekend, Schroeder, the GOP vice chairman for the past two years, will almost certainly be chosen to lead the California Republican Party when the GOP’s delegates gather at the Hyatt Regency in Sacramento.

The enfant terrible becomes elder statesman.

As the party chairman, Schroeder will face an array of challenges that, if unmet, threaten to undermine the clout of the California GOP.

For starters, Schroeder will lead the effort to pry the Assembly from the Democrats, who recaptured control last year. To do so, he must raise millions and millions of dollars, a task made more difficult by recent changes in campaign finance laws.

Schroeder will also have to prepare the GOP for what promises to be a bruising campaign to maintain the GOP’s control of the governor’s mansion in 1998.

He is also faced with the task of enforcing party discipline at a time when Proposition 198 will allow voters, for the first time, to cast their ballots in either party’s primary.

And, perhaps most daunting, Schroeder wants to make the California GOP more appealing to women, Latino and black voters, who have shunned the party in great numbers.

Schroeder, 40, says that despite his history as political hatchet man, he is the one to unite the GOP and at the same time make it more diverse.

“I only fight for things that I believe in,” Schroeder said. “I’m committed to this, and I have a plan.”

Schroeder’s allies say his aggressive manner is just the antidote the party needs to recover from an election defeat that gave Democrats control of both houses of the California Legislature, at the same time they retained the White House.

Thomas A. Fuentes, chairman of the Orange County Republican Party, has high hopes for Schroeder’s tenure. “Here is a fella who has set aside the boardroom and country club Republican style and taken to the pavement.

“He is motivated at a real gut level,” Fuentes added.

Schroeder’s ascendancy to the state chairmanship also confirms Orange County’s continued dominance of the California GOP leadership. He joins Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove), who leads the Republicans in the Assembly, and Rob Hurtt (R-Garden Grove), the Senate minority leader.

Yet Schroeder’s role as the GOP’s enforcer has left behind a trail of critics, some of whom say his aggressive style will ultimately scare people away.

“He is opposed to anyone who votes his conscience,” said Horcher, the former assemblyman recalled after he voted to keep Democrat Willie Brown as speaker. Schroeder headed up that recall effort.

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“They want to purge the party of any mainstream Republicans,” Horcher said. “They only want people who look and act like they do.”

Horcher was a Republican when he felt Schroeder’s lash. And so was Brian Setencich of Fresno, who served briefly as Assembly Speaker after he cut a deal with the Democrats. Schroeder helped direct a stealth campaign against Setencich that drove him from office.

Schroeder also launched a highly public campaign to discredit Orange County Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi, another Republican, for conducting an investigation into alleged election law violations by Republican Assemblyman Scott Baugh.

Schroeder accused Capizzi of “hypocrisy” and of “trying to cover his political rear end.”

Even as he prepares to become state party chairman, Schroeder makes no apologies for his campaigns against Capizzi, Allen and the others. He says a political party is meaningless unless it can agree on a set of ideas and enforce them.

And Schroeder says he did nothing that wasn’t approved by the party leadership.

“I had the green light for whatever I did,” he said.

Schroeder, a Michigan native who grew up in New York, says his love of politics grew out of a love of history and reading. He said he read a lot during his family’s frequent moves, owing to his father’s work for the defense industry.

He describes himself as a conservative of libertarian bent who sees former President Ronald Reagan as a guiding star.

“I think that most people will make the right decision if you give them the freedom to do it,” he said.

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A lawyer who represents clinics and doctors, Schroeder spent years working his way up through GOP volunteer clubs. He is the former president of the California Republican Assembly and was a delegate to the 1992 Republican convention.

He is also the owner of the National Chiropractic Council, an insurance-buying group that helps provide malpractice coverage for chiropractors.

In 1994, Schroeder’s company sued his mother, Dessa, in a business dispute. Schroeder accused his mother, an insurance broker, of trying to take business away from his company.

He also claimed that his mother had taken sides against him in his divorce, and that she had lent her daughter-in-law, Kathleen, $90,000 to use against him.

The dispute briefly caused turmoil in the industry, and was written up in the June 1995 edition of the Chiropractic Journal.

In the suit, Schroeder’s company demanded that Dessa Schroeder surrender documents that belonged to Michael’s company. At one point, Schroeder’s attorneys asked a judge to compel his mother to turn over the documents and to jail her for contempt if she didn’t, court records show.

Dessa Schroeder was not jailed, but the dispute lives. Now in its third year, it is on hold pending an appeal on a procedural matter.

Dessa Schroeder did not return a phone message left at her office.

Michael Schroeder also declined to talk in detail about the case, which he said should be settled out of court.

“It is a regrettable situation arising out of a divorce . . . something that can be resolved within the family,” he said.