Dana Rohrabacher

Dana Rohrabacher
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California's 46th district
Incumbent
Assumed office  January 3, 1989–
Preceded by	Dan Lungren
Succeeded by	Incumbent
Born	June 21 1947 (1947--) (age 60) Coronado, California
Political party	Republican
Spouse	Rhonda Carmony
Religion	Baptist

Dana Tyron Rohrabacher (born June 21, 1947, in Coronado, California) is an American politician, who has been a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives since 1989, currently representing California's 46th congressional district.

Education

Rohrabacher graduated from Palos Verdes High School in Palos Verdes Estates, California, attended Harbor Junior College, and received his bachelor's degree in history from California State University, Long Beach in 1969. He received his master's degree in American Studies from the University of Southern California.

Tenure at the Reagan White House

Prior to his election to Congress in 1988, Rohrabacher served as Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan. For seven years he was one of the President's senior speechwriters. During his tenure at the White House, Rohrabacher played a leading role in the formulation of the Reagan Doctrine. He also helped formulate President Reagan's Economic Bill of Rights, a package of economic reforms that the President introduced in a speech before the Jefferson Memorial.

Congressional career

Rohrabacher presides over a meeting of the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee of the House Science Committee.

With Reagan soon leaving office, Rohrabacher left the Administration in 1988 to pursue the open House seat recently vacated by Dan Lungren. With the fundraising help of friend Oliver North, Rohrabacher was able to win the Republican primary and capture the seat, centered around northern coastal Orange County. A friend and fellow White House aide, Chris Cox, won a seat in the same election in southern Orange County. The pair remained close though Cox is now chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Rohrabacher was Chairman of the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee of the House Science Committee from 1997 until January 2005, having received a two-year waiver to serve beyond the six-year term limit.

As a senior member of the International Relations Committee, Rohrabacher led the effort to deny Most Favored Nation trading status to the People's Republic of China, citing that nation's dismal human rights record and opposition to democracy. His subcommittee assignments are East Asia and Pacific, and Middle East and South Asia.

Political positions

An earlier picture of Rohrabacher, from 105th Congress's pictorial directory

Illegal immigration

Rohrabacher is a staunch opponent of illegal immigration. He was an advocate for California's Proposition 187, which sought to deny immigrants without proper documentation any government services, including education for their children. In 2004 he proposed a bill to withhold emergency room services to people who cannot prove their immigration status. The proposed bill was overwhelmingly defeated [1].

On March 30, 2006, Rohrabacher decried a guest worker proposal as "the foul odor that's coming out of the United States Senate." He said that if illegal immigrants who do many farm jobs were deported, "the millions of young men who are prisoners around our country can pick the fruits and vegetables. I say, let the prisoners pick the fruits." [2][3]

Voting rights for DC residents

In January 2004, Rohrabacher proposed giving Washington, D.C. residents the right to vote for congressional representation by treating them as Maryland residents for the purpose of Congressional elections. [4]

Opposition to current Ethiopian government

In March 2005, Rohrabacher introduced HR 1061, the American Property Claims Against Ethiopia Act, which would "prohibit United States assistance to the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia until the Ethiopian government returns all property of United States citizens". The bill was introduced by Rohrabacher at the behest of Gebremedhin Berhane, a former Eritrean national. His son, Petros, was described by the Daily Pilot News of Newport Beach, California as "one of Rep. Rohrabacher's surfing buddies".

On March 7, 2006, Rohrabacher introduced HR 4895, an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, "to limit the provision of the United States military assistance and the sale, transfer, or licensing of United States military equipment or technology to Ethiopia." [5]

Medical marijuana

Contrary to most Republican Party Members of Congress, Rohrabacher is a supporter of medicinal use of marijuana. He and Maurice Hinchey have jointly offered the Hinchey-Rohrabacher medical marijuana amendment to Commerce Justice and Science appropriations bill that would prohibit the Department of Justice from prosecuting patients who use marijuana for medical purposes.[6] Rohrabacher said conservatives should take states' rights into consideration when considering the issue of marijuana.

Global warming

Rohrabacher does not believe that the current global warming is manmade. During a congressional hearing on climate change on February 8, 2007, Rohrabacher joked that previous warming cycles may have been caused by carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by "dinosaur flatulence." [7]

War in Iraq

Rohrabacher has taken a strong pro-war stance.

Controversies

No Military Service

The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved.

Rohrabacher was of draft age during Vietnam but avoided service. To help him earn a deferment he brought an X-ray of a hip he injured in high school football to his draft physical. Yet his own Website boasts of his continued surfing, when his crippled hip apparently gives him no trouble. http://copleydc.com/copleydc_staff/Eckert/eckert_1-13-03.htm

Involvement with Jack Abramoff

Rohrabacher has been close friends of now-convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff since the mid-1980s. His relationship included the following:

• In 1999 Rohrabacher went on an Abramoff-funded trip to the Marshall Islands with John Doolittle (R-CA), Ken Calvert (R-CA), delegates of Guam, American Samoa, Virgin Islands and 8 staffers.[8]

• In 2000, Abramoff listed Rohrabacher as one of the his references on his loan application for the purchase of SunCruz Casinos. "I don't remember it, but I would certainly have been happy to give him a good recommendation," Rohrabacher said in April 2005, when news reports first arose. "He's a very honest man." [9]

• In January 2002, Rohrabacher, took a six-day trip to Malaysia, accompanied by his wife and two of Abramoff’s then-partners at the firm Greenberg Traurig. According to House records and to Rohrabacher's spokesman, the Malaysia trip focused on terrorism and trade issues. The spokesman called the trip "very positive." [10]

• In April 2005, as Abramoff became the target of a grand jury investigation, Rohrabacher said that "Jack has made some mistakes," "but he is not the dishonest, malevolent, arrogant, wheeler-dealer that people are portraying. He is a fine man." [11]

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher has come to the defense of disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff in The Washington Post and elsewhere, saying he's a good person who's been unjustly criticized. Rohrabacher admits to being a longtime friend of Abramoff. An actual quote from Rohrabacher is as follows: "They're portraying Jack as a monster. I see him more as a good person who's done bad things and has to be punished for doing bad things.... I think that he obviously has done some things that are wrong and illegal and he's going to have to pay the price for it.” Rohrabacher has publicly taken the position that he thinks that “... a lot of other things that have been characterized as corruption on the part of Abramoff are actually standard operating procedures for lobbying in Washington, D.C., arranging trips and things like that. So I think that he's received a lot of unjust criticism."

• In July 2005, Rohrabacher said that he had been eating at Signatures, a restaurant owned by Abramoff, at Abrmaoff's expense once or twice a month, and that the meals fell under the friendship exemption in House rules. He also said he tried to take Mr. Abramoff out regularly, paying for the lobbyist's meals in return. "Just because you are a member of Congress doesn't mean you have to give up your friendships," Rohrabacher said, adding that "it was dinner with a friend and I didn't think of it as a gift."

• In December 2005, Rohrabacher again defended Abramoff, telling the Washington Post: "I think he's been dealt a bad hand and the worst, rawest deal I've ever seen in my life. Words like bribery are being used to describe things that happened every day in Washington and are not bribes." [12]

• In March 2006, following Abramoff's guilty plea of fraud in the SunCruz case, Rohrabacher was the sole member of Congress who wrote the judge in the case to urge leniency in sentencing. "I think when he is being punished for the things he did that were wrong, some of the things that he did that were right and admirable in the past should be taken into consideration," Rohrabacher said in an interview. In his letter to the judge, Rohrabacher described "a far different Jack than the profit-seeking megalomaniac portrayed in the press." "Jack was a selfless patriot for most of the time I knew him," the congressman wrote, recalling his friend as an ardent anti-Communist during the Cold War. [13]

Involvement with Afghanistan and the Taliban

Rohrabacher had a history of involvement in Afghanistan dating back to the Cold War, when he openly supported the groups that were fighting troops from the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. [14]. In late 1988, Rohrabacher went to Afghanistan:

After I left the White House and was elected to Congress, but before I was sworn into Congress, I knew I had that two months between November and January to do things that I could never do once I was elected to Congress. I chose to hike into Afghanistan as part of a small Mujahedin unit and to engage in a battle against the Russian and communist forces near and around the city of Jalalabad.[15]

In the November/December 1996 issue of Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Rohrabacher was reported as saying that the Taliban were not terrorists or revolutionaries, that they would develop a disciplined society that would leave no room for terrorists, and that the Taliban posed no threat to the United States.[16]

However, in a September 11, 1998 editorial in the The Washington Post, Rohrabacher strongly rebuked the Taliban for providing refuge to Osama bin Laden, mass killings of Shi'ites and ethnic Uzbeks, Turks, and Tajiks, and restrictions on the rights of Afghan women and children:

It has been no secret that bin Laden has been sheltered by the Taliban. The Clinton administration was mute while one of the most violent anti-Western Muslim sects spilled into Afghanistan from their Pakistan-based "religious schools" and took control of the capital. We remained paralyzed while they moved to destroy moderate Muslim forces. While administration officials expressed concern of the Taliban's complete denial of rights for women, it was little more than lip service. Even modest support from the United States for moderate Muslim forces in Afghanistan and serious political pressure on Pakistan could have thwarted the takeover of this strategically important country by these militant extremists. The danger of the spread of fanaticism expressed by the newly independent republics of Central Asia was smugly ignored.

During the summer of 2001, Rohrabacher made a trip to Qatar that was paid for by the Islamic Institute and the Government of Qatar, according to Rohrabacher’s financial disclosure forms. While in Qatar, Rohrabacher, Grover Norquist, and Khaled Saffuri met with Taliban Foreign Minister Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil. Wakil reportedly asked for help in increasing the amount of foreign aid sent by the United States to Afghanistan, apparently in exchange for U.S. oil company UNOCAL being allowed to construct of an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. If Rohrabacher was conducting diplomacy, he was in violation of the Logan Act, which prohibits citizens from doing so if not in an official capacity. Rohrabacher told wire service reporters who were present in Doha, Qatar at the time that he had discussed a “peace plan” with the Taliban. But Norquist, a close associate of Rohrabacher, said that the meeting happened accidentally and that it included Rohrabacher yelling at them about blowing up the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan.[17]

The Taliban later announced in Kabul that it had rejected what it considered were unreasonable demands by the U.S. side. Rohrabacher’s staff would not answer questions about the Taliban talks. [18]

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Rohrabacher claimed that the attacks were due to incompetence on the part of the Clinton administration. [19]

Payment for 30-year-old screenplay

On November 4, 2005, The Los Angeles Times reported that Rohrabacher "used his influence to open doors in Washington for a Hollywood producer pitching a television show after the producer paid him a $23,000 option on a nearly 30 year old screenplay." The producer, Joseph Medawar, has since been indicted on fraud charges by the FBI and has pled not guilty. The question is whether the producer paid him the money for the screenplay or if the money was for the introductions to congressional and federal officials conducted by Rohrabacher. Rohrabacher claims that the introductions were done in good faith and were nothing that was not done regularly for legitimate causes, and that the introductions have only become an issue because of Joseph Medawar's misdeeds.

In May 2006, Rohrabacher, through his press secretary, announced that he will return the $23,000. The decision was made public shortly before Medawar took responsibility in a United States District Court for bilking about $3.4 million from about 50 investors. [20]

Defense of Extraordinary Rendition and Torture

On April 17, 2007, while defending the Bush Administration's program of extraordinary rendition during a House hearing on transatlantic relations, Rohrabacher stated that the unfair treatment of one innocent suspect is an acceptable "unfortunate consequence" of holding others who would otherwise be free to commit terror acts. After receiving boos and groans from the gallery, Rohrabacher responded, "Well I hope it's your families, I hope it's your families that suffer the consequences."^[1] Rohrabacher was subsequently interrupted by protesters wearing orange jumpsuits who were removed from the gallery. For his comment that imprisoning and torturing one innocent person was a fair price to pay for locking up 50 terrorists who would "go out and plant a bomb and kill 20,000 people,"^[2] Rohrabacher was named Countdown with Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" on April 25.

Family

In August 1997, Rohrbacher married Orange County political operative (and fellow surfer) Rhonda Carmony. On April 27, 2004, he and his wife became parents to triplets.

Libertarianism

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Rohrabacher was influenced by the anarcho-capitalist ideas of Robert LeFevre, who had moved his Freedom School to Santa Ana, California, renaming it Rampart College. [21] Rohrabacher would appear at various meetings and conferences, including the "Left-Right Festival of Mind Liberation" in 1969. [22] Rohrabacher would often play the four-string banjo and sing his original libertarian-themed songs, including "Individual Man": "I don't own nobody. Nobody does own me. I'm just an individual man, just want to be free...."

Bryan Doherty writes that "Out west a California Libertarian Alliance (CLA), with Dana Rohrabacher and Shawn Steel ... as chief organizers, often in cooperation with Robert LeFevre (freshly relocated there) , ran huge mass meetings and conferences with names, such as the Left/Right Festivarl of Mind liberation, and featuring speakers ranging from Mises to Hess, from LeFevre to ex-SDSer Carl Oglesby." ^[3] Also, "[Rohrabacher] was sent out on a shoestring [by LeFevre] to sing his anarcho-LeFevrian folk songs at college campuses across the nation to help turn right-wingers into LeFevre-style libertarians. Rohrabacher is known today to the residents of Orange County as their congressman."^[4]

Rohrabacher [23] drifted towards the mainstream along with billionaire funder of libertarian causes Charles Koch. He worked for a while in the early 1970s as an editorial writer for The Register (today called The Orange County Register) newspaper in Santa Ana, California, then a conservative newspaper with a libertarian bent. [24]

According to Doherty, "By the 1980s, a calmer Rohrabacher was a Reagan speechwriter, and pure anticommunism seemed to be motivating him more than his old-school libertarianism. ... [He] tells me that 'we did what young people always do: carried our ideals out to the very farthest logical extension. Once you push abstract theory out too far in reality it becomes unworkable.' ... 'I believed we should go for no government. And of course it doesn't take you long to realize that's not going to be too much a part of the public debate.'"^[5]

Rohrabacher remained an amateur musician who in the late 1980s appeared, alongside Chris Cox, to sing at the Orange County Press Club's musical lampooning annual political events.

2006 election

In November 2006, Rohrabacher faced Democrat Jim Brandt (neither had any opponent in the June primary). The two faced each other in the 2004 elections, with Rohrabacher defeating Brandt by a 62.0%-32.5% margin (a Libertarian and a Green split the remaining 5.5%).

References

1. ^ rtsp://video.c-span.org/15days/e041707_foreign2.rm C-SPAN (starts at about 1:51:00)
2. ^ http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/24/rohrabacher-terrorists/
3. ^ Bryan Doherty. Radicals for Capitalism; a Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. New York: Public Affairs, 2007. p373.
4. ^ Doherty, ibidem, p.377.
5. ^ Doherty, ibidem, p.535--6

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Dana Rohrabacher

• U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher official House site
• Dana Rohrabacher at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Federal Election Commission v Dana Rohrabacher campaign finance reports and data
• Dana Rohrabacher at the Notable Names Database
• On the Issues — Dana Rohrabacher issue positions and quotes
• Extraordinary Rendition Hearing
• OpenSecrets.org — Dana Rohrabacher campaign contributions
• Project Vote Smart — Representative Dana T. Rohrabacher (CA) profile
• SourceWatch Congresspedia — Dana Rohrabacher profile
• Washington Post v Congress Votes Database: Dana Rohrabacher voting record
• Congressman Dana Rohrabacher official campaign site
• Planetary Defense

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