Boxer still quick to take the gloves off

Reporting from Washington — 

Barbara Boxer came to the U.S. Senate almost 18 years ago, a scrappy and unabashed liberal. Since then, the California Democrat has worked to shed her image as an ideologue.

She teamed up with one Republican senator in pursuit of a tax break for high-tech corporations. She worked with another senator who is about as far to the right as she is to the left — James Inhofe (R-Okla.) — to pass a massive water bill.

Over the objections of President Obama, who wanted to cut the funding, she and a third Republican senator sought money for more Boeing C-17 military cargo planes assembled in their states.

Yet Boxer remains known less for her forays across the aisle than for her partisan leanings and fists-up attitude, which were on display after she took over the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2007.

Boxer invited former Vice President Al Gore to testify about their desire for Congress to address global warming. But when Inhofe, a leading skeptic of human-caused climate change, repeatedly interrupted Gore, Boxer bluntly reminded the former chairman that she was setting the agenda now that her party was in control.

“You’re not making the rules,” Boxer told Inhofe. “Elections have consequences. So I make the rules.”

That prickly approach and her political positions have come under attack in this election season from the three major Republican candidates vying to challenge her in November. One of them, former Hewlett Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina, castigates the 69-year-old Boxer as a legislative lightweight who takes “a rigid partisan approach to every issue.”

Boxer, elected in 1992 after serving a decade in the House, points to lists of accomplishments over her three terms. She said that she has sponsored or cosponsored more than 1,000 measures, from designating hundreds of thousands of acres in California as wilderness to strengthening toy-safety rules.

“I’m not a fierce partisan,” Boxer said in a recent interview outside the Senate chamber. “I am a strong fighter for the things I believe in.”

Yet her sometimes combative style makes it more likely that Republicans in search of compromise will approach fellow California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who comes across as more measured.

Boxer’s style can be an asset “in that it fires up her supporters,” said John J. Pitney Jr., a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College and a former Republican party official. “The downside is that it makes bipartisan bridge-building a little more difficult.”

Ironically, Boxer’s and Feinstein’s records are remarkably similar, and they often work together on legislation. “Everybody has a different way of working,” said Feinstein, who is the honorary chair of Boxer’s reelection campaign. “It does not mean that one is better than the other.”

Still, they occasionally split. Boxer opposed the reappointment of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, going to war in Iraq and President Bush’s nomination of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of State. Feinstein took the opposite positions.

Senate watchers differ over Boxer’s influence, and whether her tenure in the Senate has changed her style.

“She’s still got very strong views and expresses them forcefully,” said Norman J. Ornstein, an expert on Congress at the American Enterprise Institute. But as Boxer has gained risen in seniority, she is “focused more on how do you get something done than on scoring points.”

But Ross K. Baker, a Rutgers University political scientist who studies Congress, said Boxer’s “influence may be less prominent than her voice.”

The limits of Boxer’s approach can be seen by the fate of one of her top priorities: legislation to limit global-warming emissions. The fact that the issue came to the fore as Boxer became chairman of the environment committee put her on the knife’s edge. The issue dovetails with Boxer’s lifelong interest in the environment but also raises the ire of Republicans like few other subjects.

“It’s made her more influential inside the Congress, but it’s made her electorally more vulnerable,” said UC Berkeley political scientist Bruce Cain.

Her committee passed a climate-change bill months ago. But it did so without the support of any Republicans, who complained that the legislation would drive up energy prices and harm the economy. They also boycotted the meeting at which Democrats approved the bill.

As the bill stalled, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, rather than Boxer, emerged as the lead Democrat trying to broker a compromise. Kerry and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) recently unveiled a bill but without a Republican co-sponsor. It faces uncertain prospects.

“When it comes to environmental policy, I think she’s just positioned so far left it’s harder for people on the Republican side to reach out to her,” said Chelsea Maxwell , a former senior climate aide to retired Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) and now a lobbyist.

Even though the climate-change bill has stalled, Boxer is revered among environmentalists, who appreciate her efforts to craft as strong a bill as possible in the face of divisions, even among her fellow Democrats.

“The reality is that she got a bill through her committee,” said David DiMartino, a former Democratic Senate aide working with a coalition supporting clean energy and climate legislation. “She is big enough to understand that her role was to get the bill as far as it got, and now she’s going to be part of a larger effort to secure its success.”

If that measure poses political danger, so too did Boxer’s work on the healthcare bill. She risked the anger of her longtime allies in the abortion rights movement when she negotiated an agreement with Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.). He had threatened to withhold his vote until reassured that the measure did not open the door to government-financed abortions.

Although the abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America was disappointed in the language Boxer negotiated, the group’s policy director, Donna Crane, said: “Had it not been for Barbara Boxer, that language would have been a lot worse — and healthcare reform would be dead.”

Among her Senate colleagues, Boxer is described as tough but respected — even liked — by Republican adversaries.

Inhofe said that he considers Boxer a “good friend,” despite their differences. “We can fight like cats and dogs and still like each other,” he said.

Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who is backing Assemblyman Chuck DeVore in the GOP Senate primary, was critical of Boxer for upbraiding a general who called her “ma’am” during a hearing last year (“Do me a favor. Could you say ‘senator’ instead of ‘ma’am’?” Boxer asked the general. “It’s just a thing. I worked so hard to get that title, so I’d appreciate it.”)

When asked about Boxer’s working with Republicans, often in pursuit of money for their states, DeMint noted, “There’s a lot of bipartisanship when it comes to spending.”

“There’s a lot of bipartisanship when it comes to money,” he said.

Vic Fazio, a former California Democratic congressman who served in the House with Boxer, said Boxer remains the same passionate advocate of liberal causes she was when she first arrived in the Capitol three decades ago — someone “who is not afraid to take stands.”

But since Boxer took over the environment committee, she has become “much more focused on delivering for California,” Fazio said. “She knows that she’s in a position to do a lot for the state.”

Boxer herself said that she has changed from her early days on Capitol Hill.

“I think we all change as we get older,” she said. “When I got to the Senate, people said you’ve only been a year and you’ve changed. I said, ‘Well, I only had one minute to express myself in the House. Here I have as much time as I want, and I don’t have to get excited until the last minute.’ ”

richard.simon@latimes.com