Trying to Prove the Unprovable on Bob Dornan

The wonderful thing about ex-Congressman Bob Dornan, other than that he is an ex-congressman, is that one’s distaste for the man need never be compromised by the likelihood that he will express a decent or intelligent thought.

So it was not unexpected that Dornan would keep up his fight to unseat Loretta Sanchez despite an Orange County grand jury’s finding no evidence of election fraud regarding Republican Dornan’s narrow loss to Democrat Sanchez in the 1996 election. “This issue isn’t going away,” Dornan trumpeted, with the confidence that only a truly paranoid personality can muster in the face of overwhelming evidence against his cause.

Unfortunately, Dornan is right in one sense: He won’t be vindicated, but the issue won’t go away, because Newt Gingrich is determined to pursue the Republican Party’s disastrous assault on the integrity of the Latino voter--disastrous in that this is a bloc of voters now solidly aligned with the Democratic Party, thanks to the persistent immigrant bashing that has become the GOP’s hallmark. Consequently, the House will continue its million-dollar investigation to prove the unprovable, which is that Dornan did not deserve to lose. The real goal is to weaken Sanchez’s reelection campaign by forcing her to spend $10,000 a week on legal fees proving that there was nothing untoward about the voters deciding to put Dornan out to pasture.

On the contrary, Dornan’s defeat was a marvelous tribute to the wondrous workings of American-style democracy. Once again an immigrant group has nourished the tree of liberty with the sweat of hard work and the demand for full participation in the politics of the nation. To see this, you only had to be there when my sister-in-law Sandra took the oath of citizenship with 10,000 others two years ago at the Los Angeles Convention Center. It was like a farm workers’ rally of old, and the ghost of the great Cesar Chavez floated in the air above the cries of AViva la causa!, cheering on the long lines of new citizens eager to register to vote.

Sandra was one of the first in line, and as she told anyone who cared to ask, it was because of Proposition 187, the 1994 ballot measure that eliminated state benefits for illegal immigrants. Until then, Sandra, much to my consternation, had been studiously nonpolitical. Politics in her native Nicaragua had meant the death of her brother and the impoverishment of her family, and she found it hard to believe that anything good could come from politics. She fled to this country to escape the ravages of a U.S.-approved war and in the hopes that she could find work and send money for food to the family back home.

For 10 years, she raised the children and cleaned the homes of the good citizens of Orange County for miserably low wages, but at least expecting that respect would be her reward. Then suddenly, in a scapegoating atmosphere stoked by Republican Gov. Pete Wilson and codified by Proposition 187, the millions of Sandras who raise our children, sew our clothes, build our houses and pick our crops came to be viewed as the enemy. The immigrants who had risked their lives to get here to find security and work, just as my parents had done, were derided as the abusers of the public dole and the progenitors of crime.

It was an insult deliberate and total. That’s when Sandra decided not to tarry any longer in becoming a citizen and obtaining the right to vote. And to vote Democratic because, in California at least, it’s the Republicans who have been making hard-working, law-abiding immigrants feel like criminals. Maybe if she lived in Texas, where Republican Gov. George W. Bush has rejected immigrant bashing, it would have been different. But in California and in the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans have chosen the path of exclusion. Instead of welcoming the new citizens and urging them to vote Republican, House leaders persist in a crusade to brand first-time Latino voters in Orange County as criminal subversives.

It won’t work. The good news is that even the speaker of the House is limited in his ability to corrupt the system. In Orange County, a grand jury--which incidentally included not one Latino juror--nonetheless gave the lie to those who would denigrate new citizens for daring to vote. As a result, there is no longer the wisp of an excuse for Gingrich and Dornan’s harassment of Sanchez. Let’s see sore loser Dornan stop whining and attempt to win, fair and square, in the next election. I’m certain Sandra will be out there campaigning to make sure that he once again loses.

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Robert Scheer is a Times contributing editor. E-mail: [email protected]