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Sunday, February 18, 2007
Rohrabacher playing the public card
DENA BUNIS
Washington Bureau Chief
The Orange County Register
dbunis@ocregister.com It's not that Rep. Dana Rohrabacher likes being in the minority.

But the Huntington Beach Republican has always been known for, in his words, being an "outside guy" in Congress. Now, just six weeks into his minority status, he's getting more public attention than when he was in the majority.

And it all has to do with the case of two ex-Border Patrol agents – Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean – who are in federal jail after being convicted of shooting a drug dealer running away from them at the Texas-Mexico border. The two were also convicted of failing to report the incident. There were conflicting stories over whether the drug dealer had or was reaching for a weapon when he was shot.

Rohrabacher and a group of other lawmakers say the two men should have been hailed as heroes for trying to police the border.

Rohrabacher has been on a crusade, first to keep the two men from having to report to jail last month, and now to get President Bush to pardon them or to have his Justice Department help persuade an appeals judge to let them out while their convictions are being challenged.

He is happy to explain that he didn't come to Congress to work within the system and pass legislation. Having bills with his name on them has never been his goal.

A disciple of Ronald Reagan, Rohrabacher left his White House speechwriter job and ran for political office to promote his views. He's been known over the years for his colorful language and tough talk, sometimes against his own party. And when it comes to immigration, against his own president.

Rohrabacher has a passion on this issue like I've not seen in the decade I've been following his activities. Probably the last couple of times he was so worked up were in 1990, when he tried to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts, and also in the 1990s, when he railed against the U.S. policy in Afghanistan and warned about the Taliban. (He never did get the NEA axed, but his fears about the Taliban proved accurate.)

Since the beginning of this year, Rohrabacher has been on cable television and talk radio shows 33 times in his effort to bring his case about these two guys to the American public and to get Bush to see this case his way. He brought Ramos' wife to the State of the Union address and was more than available to media outlets in Statuary Hall at the Capitol to talk about the case.

In the beginning, only CNN's Lou Dobbs, radio talk shows hosts and bloggers were paying much attention to the issue, probably because of the ties this has to the illegal immigration issue. But interest broadened a bit last week when a group of GOP members held a news conference after Ramos was beaten in jail. Rohrabacher had predicted that since these two were career law-enforcement officers that they would be in danger if they were jailed with violent criminals who would have an axe to grind against Border Patrol agents.

Toward the end of the news conference, Rohrabacher said that if either of the two former agents ended up getting killed in jail, there would be calls for Bush's impeachment.

A juicy comment like that got some more of the television producers excited and Rohrabacher was on MSNBC. He's also been on almost every major news show on the Fox News Channel.

I asked Rohrabacher during an interview Wednesday in his new office whether he made the impeachment remark as a way to up the stakes in this debate and generate more media interest. He smiled and said he hadn't thought of it before; that he was so exercised about this issue that it just came out. But he didn't say he was sorry he said it.

He believes he needs to keep speaking out and prevent this issue from becoming last month's news. It's pretty easy for that to happen around here with so many different issues swirling around. As it is, it's been mostly Texas newspapers that have followed the story closely.

And for Rohrabacher, there's a back story to his trying to keep these two men's story in the forefront. For him, their case is an example of why the nation needs to crack down on illegal immigration. Rohrabacher believes the Democrats, the Bush administration and what he estimates are the 100 or so House Republicans who agree with Bush want to see an open border situation between the U.S. and Mexico.

Rohrabacher hopes the public outrage he's trying to generate will transfer over into public anger over Bush's immigration strategy.

Long before it became fashionable to talk about illegal immigration, Rohrabacher was on it. And he's been pretty fatalistic about whether Congress will enact a new guest-worker plan and a program to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants living here now. He believes such a proposal – which he calls amnesty – is inevitable with the Democrats in charge of Congress. (Take a look at the interviews I did with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, on News 3.)

Rohrabacher says he's going to keep the Ramos and Compean case alive as long as they are in jail. Before I went into his office, he was on the phone with the White House again trying to persuade them to intervene. So far, no go.

We'll be watching.