Exercise in Frustration for Female Lawmakers

Back during the second Reagan administration--the Stone Age, in political time--the few women in Congress won a war to integrate the all-male House gym. Barbara Boxer, then still a member of the House, set their battle cry to the tune of “Has Anybody Seen My Gal?”: “Exercise, glamorize/Where to go, will you advise/Can’t everybody use your gym?/Equal rights, we’ll wear tights/Let’s avoid those macho fights/Can’t everybody use your gym?”

Sixteen years later, “access” is still an elusive notion, a case of “You can’t get there from here.” Getting to the swimming pool, recited Rep. Loretta Sanchez, who uses the pool almost every day, means changing clothes in a distant women’s locker room, then walking through an office hallway and up a floor to the pool--or down one floor into a garage, having called ahead for an attendant to unlock a security door. An attendant also has to close the doors to the men’s showers.

“You have to be careful,” she said, “or you get a sight you really don’t want.”

Inconvenient as getting to the pool is, said the Garden Grove Democrat, “It’s a place where I can speak to some of the top Republicans. . . . I take advantage of it.”

An appropriations bill has ordered up a report on the differences between access for female and male members of Congress, but the offended gender members already know what they think. Said Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Palo Alto Democrat: “Some of the best scuttlebutt has been settled over a run on the treadmill. A lot of business has been done in the gym. . . . It’s about time there’s equal access.”

Travels With Hastert, and No Horn of Plenty

Following in the westward-bound footsteps of his live-wire predecessor Newt Gingrich, who found neoconservative gold in California, J. Dennis Hastert, the present speaker of the House, made the California rounds last week, hitting a rally at the San Diego Harley-Davidson dealership in support of the Bush administration tax cuts, and then going on to a fund-raiser to get a little of that cash back from supporters. He also spoke at the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda.

Some of that cash from Hastert’s 13-state fund-raising trip for the National Republican Congressional Committee may find its way into the coffers of Rep. Steve Horn. Fund-raising totals for House members for the first six months of the year showed that the Long Beach Republican had drummed up only $4,000--the political equivalent of the change you’d find under your sofa cushions.

That, of course, just fed the speculation that the former Cal State Long Beach president would make this term his last. Not so, said his spokeswoman, Mary Ellen Grant. “It’s not signaling anything.” And anyway, she said, Horn’s political plans in the moderate district he barely won last election will await the imminent rejiggering of congressional districts. Perhaps the fabled “gerrymander”-shaped district will be succeeded by another political amphibian model, the Horn Toad district.

Antonio, at Liberty and on the Go

No stay-at-home is Antonio Villaraigosa. The former Assembly speaker who lost the race for Los Angeles mayor is getting out and about, practicing his high-school Francais at an event honoring legendary jazzman Benny Goodman at the home of the French consul-general, and not long thereafter being honored at the Death Penalty Focus anti-death penalty group’s ninth annual party and silent auction, at a gallery in Santa Monica.

Davis to Grieving Levy Family: Not

Once burned, Gray Davis may be twice shy.

The California Republican Party’s Communications Project is scolding Gray Davis for doing “nothing” to comfort or even contact the family of missing intern Chandra Levy, whose former lover, Rep. Gary Condit, is a Davis ally whose two grown children work for the governor.

By contrast, four years ago, Davis--then the lieutenant governor on active duty in Pete Wilson’s absence--offered a $50,000 reward for information in the death of Bill Cosby’s son, Ennis. He got singed when a Republican assemblyman scolded Davis for not doing the same for a less celebrated murder victim, and Wilson withdrew the reward offer at the Cosbys’ request.

Quick Hits

* The e-invitations to an upcoming California Young Republicans event in Beverly Hills included the most important stuff right at the top, even before the agenda: valet parking, $11.

* An aide to Sylmar Democratic Assemblyman Tony Cardenas was carjacked and kidnapped in the city of San Fernando, but escaped by jumping out of the car.

* A new poll by Pacific Opinions in Irvine shows that minorities, who are not represented on the Orange County Board of Supervisors, approve of adding seats to the five-member board, while non-Latino whites are split on the idea.

* A Washington state gun group is fretting that Orange County Rep. Loretta Sanchez exhibited political “ulterior motives” in speaking to her local chapter of the National Rifle Assn., but Sanchez says she simply wanted to talk to her gun-owning constituents about the F grade she received from the gun organization.

Word Perfect

“We were trying to do the right thing, but we ended up looking foolish.”

Berkeley City Council member Kriss Worthington, apologizing for persuading the mayor to postpone and move a meeting with Japanese Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops because he objects to the Scouts’ policy toward gays.

Columnist Patt Morrison’s e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com. This week’s contributors include Megan Garvey and Jean O. Pasco.