Power outage for GOP

When his party lost control of Congress after the Nov. 7 election, also lost was Huntington Beach Rep. Dana Rohrabacher’s possibility of a chairmanship of the House science committee.

And the power shift doesn’t help Newport Beach Rep. John Campbell either. As one of the newer members of Congress, Campbell said there’s a lot less he can get done now that his party is the minority.

The congressmen have seen their power dwindle and expect their legislative agendas to stall under Democrats’ leadership, they said.

In fact, Rohrabacher, who represents Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa, predicted nearly everything will stall. With a Democratic Congress and a Republican president, he said, “there will be gridlock on most major changes for the next two years.”

There could be one exception to that stalemate, and it’s the one that rankles Rohrabacher the most: immigration. He’s been on the blunt edge of GOP opposition to any type of amnesty for illegal immigrants and guest-worker programs, while President Bush has supported a guest-worker plan.

“The only practical impact of the Democrats taking over the House will be amnesty for illegal immigrants,” Rohrabacher said.

Campbell said his biggest concern is that Democrats will “take us backward in the war on terror.” Democrats have criticized the Republican strategy but never defined an alternative, he said.

“I hope that they’re not so anxious to withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq that they let them become petri dishes in which new, bigger, better-financed terrorist groups can grow and attack us again,” he said.

When committee assignments are decided in December, Rohrabacher expects to be ranking member of the science committee or one of its subcommittees, but the chairmanship evaporated along with the GOP majority in Congress.

The majority party leads the committees and gives its members more seats, so Campbell said he’ll probably be booted from one or two of the three committees he was on.

Being in the minority party isn’t a new scenario for either congressman. Rohrabacher was elected in 1988, and Republicans have only controlled Congress since 1995. Before that, they hadn’t been in charge since the 1950s.

And Campbell was a Republican in Democrat-controlled Sacramento for five years before winning a congressional seat in 2005.

In the minority party, “you have less opportunity to make things into law, but the role is still very important,” he said.

In their new role, Campbell and Rohrabacher expect to point out where the majority party goes wrong.

They may agree on that, but the congressmen have their own, differing answers on where their party went wrong — and why they lost the election.

“We got whacked,” Campbell said. “We were soundly defeated nationally on Election Day. That doesn’t happen because of one thing; that happens because of multiple things.”

An old political saw is that to win, you have to secure your base and extend to the middle, Campbell said, adding, “I don’t think we did either in this election.”

Rohrabacher disagreed that the loss was a major one. “We didn’t win, but we weren’t badly beaten either,” he said.

Part of the reason voters rejected the GOP, Rohrabacher said, was because Republican candidates didn’t hit Democrats back hard enough.

Democrats attacked Republicans on the Iraq war and corruption scandals, and the GOP let them get away with it, he said, and Republican candidates didn’t make immigration enough of an issue in their campaigns.

Now, Democrats will be forced to take some positions on issues, Rohrabacher said.

“They’ve always said what they’re against. Now they have to say what they’re for,” he said. “They can’t get away with just pointing fingers now.”