James Rogan

Rep. James Rogan recently completed his first year as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives after serving in the California Assembly.

It has been a year marked by considerable success. Rogan, who was named to the prestigious Commerce Committee, has also been selected as a member of the powerful Judiciary Committee.

The congressman, who represents the Glendale, Burbank and Pasadena areas, recently reflected on his freshman term in Congress.

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Question: Did you find the atmosphere in Washington to be different from Sacramento?

Answer: It’s a much bigger version of the California state Assembly. The disappointing part of it, from a personal perspective, is that when there were 79 other members of the Assembly, Democrat or Republican, I knew all their names, I think I knew all their spouses, I knew the names of most of their kids, and there was an opportunity to have personal relationships with everybody. The dynamic is different in Washington. First, there are 435 members of Congress. I have actually met every member of the House of Representatives. I did it in a very methodical fashion. Since I’m a political memorabilia collector, I got the photo book and walked around and had everybody autograph it. I used it as an excuse to meet them, shake their hand, ask them about their district, tell them a little bit about mine. But it took me almost a year to do. The other thing about it is in the state Assembly when we’re in session, the doors are literally locked with sergeants at arms there, and nobody may leave the floor without a pass from the speaker. In Congress, virtually nobody is on the floor during debate. People have committee hearings going on at the same time, staff meetings, any number of things. Business is being transacted away from the House, so the only people on the floor during the debate, typically, are the participants. When the bell rings, 435 members of Congress all converge upon the Capitol, run in, vote and then leave. So the opportunity to get to know your colleagues on a personal level is much more difficult.

Q: Based on that kind of relationship, isn’t it hard to reach a consensus?

A: It’s very hard. A lot of times things are based on a level of friendship and trust. And so I think the smart members are the ones who go out of their way to get to know their colleagues. And I probably spend as much time as anybody trying to just get to know folks. Particularly senior members on the other side of the aisle, senior Democrats, because these are the fellows who literally ran the Congress, sometimes for 10 or 20 or more years, know the way the institution works, have great institutional knowledge. Many of them are now retiring en masse because they don’t want to be there anymore because it’s no fun to be in the minority. I pester them until they’ll go to lunch with me so I can pick their brain.

Q: What about getting legislation introduced and passed. Is it tougher in Washington?

A: People want me to co-sponsor or coauthor certain legislation but I don’t do that very often. I like to write my own bills, and I will co-sponsor some bills that are important to me and will coauthor some bills that are important to me. One of the reasons I didn’t like to do it in Sacramento is because when Republicans were not in control, you really had no ability to control a bill as a co-sponosr. I’ll give you an example. There was a Republican assemblyman who co-sponsored a tax-cut bill. It went out of the Assembly. When it went over to the Senate with amendments, it became a tax-increase bill. The assemblyman wanted to take his name off the bill and the Democrats told him, “No.” And then turned around and hit him in the next election, saying he had co-sponsored a tax-increase bill. So a lot of it goes back to faith and trust in your colleagues. And that certainly is true in Congress. If you put your name on something, you have to be very careful to track it. And so it’s easier for me to do that with my own legislation. In addition, Congress itself, historically, is very much seniority driven. And the more seniority one accumulates, the more influence, the more power and the more opportunities one has to affect legislation on a grander scale. I ran for Congress. I wanted to help to balance the budget and cut taxes. I was able to co-sponsor, coauthor those bills. But they’re not going to let a freshman member of Congress have the lead bill on balancing the budget. That’s going to go to the chairman of the Budget Committee. The lead bill on cutting taxes is going to be carried by the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and so forth. So younger members of Congress have to learn where to pick their fights and be content looking for areas where the big bills need to be tweaked and work with the more senior members, and not be embarrassed or frustrated over the fact that their name doesn’t get to be on the big bill. Ronald Reagan had a plaque on his desk for years that said, “There’s no end to what a person can accomplish if they don’t care who gets the credit.”

Q: Yet you did get your name attached to some legislation, including the radio spectrum auction bill, which has become somewhat famous.

A: When we were going through the negotiations for the balanced budget--all of these different committees had to come up with certain savings to make sure that we could get a balanced budget. So did the Commerce Committee, of which I am a member. One of the areas of our jurisdiction where they decided they would try to find savings was in radio spectrum auctions.

Q: A spectrum involves the frequencies used to send radio and TV signals?

A: Right, and it’s a very valuable commodity. When those are auctioned off, depending on the market and the geography, you can bring in millions of dollars. Because of our desire to find savings, I had some real concerns that when they did these spectrum auctions they would start cutting into Los Angeles County’s public safety spectrum, because of the wide geography we have and the high degree of emergency calls that come through for police and fire. So I went to members of the committee and I shared with them my concerns and told them I was thinking about doing an amendment. They told me, “You don’t need to do that; we’re gonna take care of you on this, and we’re going to write intent language into the bill so that your concerns will be mollified.” And I was satisfied.

Jane Harman, my colleague from Palos Verdes, a Democrat, had actually drafted an amendment for this. But because she’s not on the committee, she needed somebody to introduce it. So she went to Henry Waxman, another Democrat from Southern California. Apparently when Waxman and Harman presented it to the committee, they were essentially told, “You can introduce your amendment but it’s going to die.” And she was told the reason was that “when you Democrats were in control of this committee for four years, you killed all of our stuff. You didn’t give our members anything, so we’re not going to give you anything.” Very late at night, Jane and Henry came to me and said, “We have this amendment, it’s prepared, and we’ve basically been told that if you want to introduce it, and if you put your name on it, then it will stand a good chance of passing, but with our name on it, it’s going to die.” Then, as I recall, we literally took the white-out, removed Henry and Jane’s name, and it became the Rogan Amendment. It passed out of committee unanimously. Now here I am, a freshman congressman out there scrambling like every other member of Congress to get my name in the papers and come back home and show folks that I am this major power broker in Washington and make everybody think that I’ve got all this juice back there, and so out comes the press releases about the Rogan Amendment, and how freshman Congressman Rogan just unanimously got it passed, thanks to his great legislative skills. I told my staff, “You know, I know what I’m supposed to do, politically. I’m supposed to just crow about myself, and talk about how effective I am, but the truth is there’s a story here that probably ought to get told because people ought to know about how this place works.” And I felt secure enough in my own position that I felt I could tell the truth. In fact, in the newsletter to my district I reported on the Rogan Amendment. But I made sure Henry and Jane’s names got in there because I wanted folks to know that the Rogan Amendment had some other fathers.

Q: Has the bipartisan relationship ever backfired on you?

A: Henry Waxman and I went to lunch one day in the member’s dining room. I wanted to talk to him about some issues, and I like to pick his brain because he’s been there now for 24 years. The next day I was in a Republican conference when an arch conservative Republican from a Midwestern state was circulating a letter for members to sign. It made its way to me, and when the fellow handed it to me I opened it. As I started to read the letter to see if I wanted to sign it, the file was ripped out of my hands. And the guy, as he took the file away from me, just sneered at me and said, “So, how was your lunch with Henry Waxman yesterday?”

Q: I trust that isn’t the prevailing mentality in Washington.

A: It is not. And if it were, then I would be a member of an extremely foolish party.

Q: Tax reform is a favorite Rogan cause. What do you see in the next year?

A: There are a couple of fascinating dynamics in place, just as we adjourned last November. One of the things Congress was able to do was pass a significant IRS reform bill, which the president ultimately supported. That did a lot of things. It put a citizen oversight committee on top of the IRS commission. We passed a taxpayer bill of rights--I think 28 specific rights that taxpayers now have that they did not have. For example, until recently, if one was being audited by the IRS, one essentially had the burden of proving to the IRS that they did not owe the tax. Just as in a criminal case, a child molester or rapist is presumed innocent until proven guilty, we are at last affording that same presumption to a taxpayer faced with an audit. The next step is going to be even broader. And that will be tax code reform. I had heard throughout my whole political life people running for office and people in office talking about reforming the IRS, reforming the tax code. I think that day has come. The public is ready for it, the Congress is ready for it, the mood of the country is such that they expect it, and quite frankly from a purely political perspective, we Republicans in Congress, we’ve got the votes to do it. There are couple of bills to watch. First one will come up this year. I’m a co-sponsor of it. It will sunset the IRS code--17,000 pages of laws and regulations will be sunsetted as of, I think, Dec. 31, 2000 or 2001. But that’s really an aside, because the real debate in this next session of Congress will be, with what do we replace it? Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey is a staunch believer in a pure, flat tax and has supported that, I think, since he came to Congress in 1984. My subcommittee associate, Billy Tauzin, takes the position that rather than a flat tax, which still leaves the IRS in place and the taxing authority in place, we should totally scrap the code, scrap the IRS, move away from tax forms and income taxes and instead derive revenue from a national sales tax that would be collected by the states. This is going to be an incredibly fascinating debate.”

Q: And your position?

A: I’m very sympathetic and lean very strongly toward a national sales tax. Because I think that’s the fairest. Those who consume the most will pay the most. It would bring an untold hundreds of billions of dollars from what is now an underground economy, because even dope dealers have to go to the grocery store and have to make purchases. The other attraction to me is that it would totally blow out the IRS forever. My concern about a flat tax is it still leaves an IRS in place and, more than that, leaves Congress in place to start passing additional deductions along the way as political favors to special-interest groups. I would take either a flat tax or a national sales tax right now over the status quo. But if we did a flat tax there are couple of things that I think ought to be sacrosanct. No. 1 is the mortgage deduction and No. 2 would be deductions for charitable contributions. My prediction is that when the debate is over and we actually move toward consolidating a bill, we will move toward a modified flat tax, with deductions for home mortgage, charitable contributions, maybe one or two others.

Bob Rector is op-ed page editor for The Times Valley and Ventura County editions.