POLITICS

The first time Democrat Jon Lauritzen ran for the 38th Assembly District, his campaign made headlines when party volunteers charged Simi Valley police officers with harassing and intimidating them as they handed out leaflets supporting his election bid.

Back for another try four years later, Lauritzen, 62, said he and his supporters now feel more welcome in the largely conservative city because the local Democratic club has since taken on a higher profile, aggressively campaigning for Democratic candidates.

But even as a bevy of labor groups walk precincts on behalf of Lauritzen and other Democrats, the retired high school teacher concedes that he is facing long odds in his effort to succeed Republican Tom McClintock, forced from the seat by term limits.

Not only do Republicans greatly outnumber Democrats in the district, which covers Simi Valley, Fillmore and parts of the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, his Republican opponent, physician Keith Richman, has trounced him in fund-raising.

So in the waning days before next week’s election, Lauritzen has his fingers crossed, saying he hopes that after the conservative politics of McClintock, voters in the district will have tired of Republican representation that can get little done in an Assembly controlled by Democrats.

“That’s the only chance I have,” Lauritzen said.

But Richman, 46, who bills himself as a moderate Republican, said voters are not likely to confuse him with McClintock.

The millionaire internist favors abortion rights, opposes Proposition 38 (the school voucher initiative) and advocates increased funding for public education.

“I’m constructive. I can work with people and get things done,” said Richman, who spent $420,000 of his own money to win a close-fought primary in March.

“The conservative wing of the Republican Party put in a lot of money against me, and I had to spend more than I planned,” said Richman, president of a Mission Hills-based medical group. He has raised $727,932, counting his own $420,000 contribution.

Meanwhile, Lauritzen, who has seen little support from Assembly leaders because of the district’s GOP leanings, has been forced to slug it out with the $38,282 he has raised to date, including $17,500 in loans.

The Chatsworth resident, who spent 34 years as a math and computer science teacher, plans to spend the remaining days of the campaign touting his proposals for improving education: strengthening emergency teaching credential requirements, modernizing school facilities, and requiring increased technology training for teachers.

Lauritzen also is calling for state oversight of the massive Newhall Ranch housing project to minimize its effect on roads, sewers, utilities and schools.

“The whole region needs to be looked at in terms of infrastructure,” he said.

Lauritzen calls his opponent a “decent guy,” but he questions Richman’s Republican credentials, because his positions appear to be so similar to Lauritzen’s own. He also takes particular delight in pointing out that Richman’s wife, Deborah, is a registered Democrat.

“He made a strategic move by declaring himself a Republican,” Lauritzen said. “He’d rather be a Democrat, if he thought he could win as one.”

Richman, who said he changed his party registration from Democrat to Republican in 1992, scoffs at Lauritzen’s assertion, and for evidence of his party loyalty he points to his tenure on Los Angeles’ Community Redevelopment Agency as an appointee of Republican Mayor Richard Riordan.

“I’m just a mainstream Republican,” said Richman, who added that he did not know which political party his wife is registered under.

McClintock endorsed Richman’s opponent in the primary, but he has since won the incumbent’s backing, as well as the support of Republican leaders from across Ventura and Los Angeles counties.

Among his top priorities, Richman said, is to push for massive spending on roads, highways and water systems.

“We need to make investments in our future,” Richman said.

And as a physician, Richman said he is keenly interested in health-care reforms that would make insurance more accessible and affordable.

He is also concerned that health-care providers are not being adequately compensated for their services, attributing the recent collapse of Simi Valley-based Family Health Care to insufficient reimbursements from health plans.

“We need to reduce the amount of uncompensated care that providers give,” said Richman, whose campaign received $16,039 from the California Medical Action Committee.

Richman, a Northridge resident and father of two, said he would leave his medical practice, Lakeside Medical Group, if elected. But he has not yet determined whether he would sell his interest in the 250-employee company.

“I see myself as a citizen legislator,” he said.

Also running for the seat is Libertarian candidate Philip Baron, who has raised nearly $3,000 to date. Starting today, his campaign will air commercials on cable channels in Simi Valley and the San Fernando Valley.

Reporting from Sacramento — As a new poll found a majority of California voters want to repeal increases to the state’s gas tax and vehicle fees, Gov. Jerry Brown has begun campaigning to preserve them, arguing the sacrifice is needed to fix long-neglected roads and bridges and improve mass transit.

Repeal of the higher taxes and fees was supported by 51% of registered voters in the state, according to a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times statewide poll.

The survey found 38% of registered voters supported keeping the higher taxes, 9% hadn’t heard enough to say either way and 2% said they wouldn’t vote on the measure.

The results bode well for a measure that Republican members of Congress hope to place on the November statewide ballot that could boost turnout of GOP voters by offering the chance to repeal the gas tax increase, said Bob Shrum, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC.

“If it qualifies for the ballot it will be, I suspect, very hard to sustain it,” Shrum said of the tax. “It’s almost dead.”

At issue is Senate Bill 1, approved by the Legislature and governor in April 2017. It raised the gas tax by 12 cents per gallon, boosted the diesel fuel tax by 20 cents per gallon and increased vehicle fees. The new charges will raise $5.4 billion annually for road and transit projects.

In launching a campaign to preserve the taxes, Brown has come out swinging, calling the proposed repeal initiative “devious and deceptive” in a speech Friday to Southern California transportation leaders.

“The test of America’s strength is whether we defeat this stupid repeal measure, which is nothing more than a Republican stunt to get a few of their losers returned to Congress, and we’re not going to let that happen,” Brown told the transportation officials at Union Station in Los Angeles.

The California Transportation Commission has so far allocated $9.2 billion for transportation projects throughout California as a result of SB 1.

The governor’s comments drew a sharp rebuke as “disgraceful name-calling” from Carl DeMaio, a Republican leader of the initiative drive who is a former member of the San Diego City Council.

The poll results are encouraging, he said.

New poll finds a volatile race for second place »

“It just goes to show you that in order for Gov. Jerry Brown and his backers to prevail in keeping the tax in place they are going to have to pull out all stops, and the level of dishonesty is going to be breathtaking,” DeMaio said.

The governor and other supporters of the tax “might have a chance” to succeed, Shrum said, if they make the question about safe bridges, fixing the state’s crumbling roads and boosting the economy.

That is the tactic that seems to be emerging.

Caltrans officials held a news conference Tuesday in Oxnard to announce $68.6 million in SB 1 funds to build an overpass for Rice Avenue over busy rail tracks.

The project will end delays as cars wait for trains to pass and make safer an intersection that has been identified as one of the most dangerous in the state, officials said.

Brown had planned to attend the Oxnard event, but his flight from Sacramento was delayed. The governor plans similar events throughout the state, aides said, and he made his case to reporters in a conference call.

“It’s great to recognize this, one of many projects that SB 1 is going to finance,” Brown said. “It’s going to save lives. It’s going to make commuting and traveling easier and safer.”

That supporters of the tax are addressing voters outside of Los Angeles and San Francisco is also noteworthy. The poll found only 44% of voters in Los Angeles want to repeal the tax, but the number goes to 55% in the suburbs, 56% in the state’s Central Valley and 64% in Orange and San Diego counties and the Inland Empire.

Shrum said supporters of the tax should be concerned about the level of opposition by voters, including the poll findings that half of Latino voters want to repeal the taxes. “That’s not a promising number, given you have to use a Democratic base” to mount a campaign to keep the tax, he said.

“If Democrats are going to save this they are going to have to spend a lot of money,” Shrum added.

Coverage of California politics »

Hoping to boost turnout of GOP voters, Republican leaders providing major funding of the repeal initiative include House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, who, because he is poised to be the next speaker, has a lot on the line when it comes to who controls Congress.

The campaign against the initiative is backed by a coalition of deep-pocketed big businesses that often align with Republicans to fight higher taxes, and it also has support from labor, law enforcement and cities.

The “Fix Our Roads” coalition fighting repeal includes the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, the Bay Area Council, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the League of California Cities, the State Building & Construction Trades Council of California and the California Assn. of Highway Patrolmen.

A political committee set up to fight any attempt to repeal the gas tax has raised more than $1 million so far.

The poll did not shake the confidence of anti-repeal coalition leader Michael Quigley, executive director of the California Alliance for Jobs.

“This campaign will be about whether voters want to rip away thousands of local projects, whether they want unsafe, congested roads, and whether they want to let partisan politicians take us backward,” Quigley said.

The governor’s leading role could help to keep the gas tax on the books, but his ability to assist is limited, said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist and consultant to the poll. “The governor’s numbers aren’t what they used to be.”

The poll found that 48% of voters approved of the job Brown has done and 40% disapproved.

The online survey was conducted from April 18 to May 18 and included 691 registered voters. The overall margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Jill Darling, survey director of the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research, contributed to this report.

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

Twitter: @mcgreevy99

UPDATES:

10:15 a.m.: This article was updated with revised figures from state officials who reported that the California Transportation Commission has allocated a total of $9.2 billion from SB 1 funds for transportation projects.

This article was originally published at 12:05 a.m.

WASHINGTON — Does Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), who has tormented the nation’s cigarette manufacturers for 15 years, now loom as the tobacco industry’s savior ?

This scenario, which would have been thought surreal only months ago, suddenly seems only mildly far-fetched. And it reflects how far the fortunes of the once-mighty tobacco lobby have fallen, particularly amid damaging revelations in recent months.

Ever since Waxman, himself a former smoker, took over the Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health and environment in 1979, he has used the post as a bully pulpit to attack cigarette makers. When he embarked on his then lonely crusade against one of the country’s richest and most powerful interests, it was considered hazardous to a lawmaker’s health.

Nonetheless, it was Waxman’s bill in 1984 that created the current series of rotating warning labels on cigarette packs and advertising. In 1990, he sought to severely restrict tobacco companies’ ability to link their brands with glamorous and appealing models in print ads and on billboards. But Congress wasn’t ready to go that far just yet.

Then last year, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a landmark report stating that secondhand tobacco smoke poses a significant health risk to nonsmokers and is responsible for about 3,000 lung cancer deaths a year in the United States. Waxman jumped back in.

He has held a series of high-profile hearings, including a historic session where the heads of seven cigarette companies testified for the first time. These carefully staged media events–which critics have likened to an inquisition–have rocked the industry.

At the same time, the Food and Drug Administration, armed with newly disclosed industry documents, began to pursue evidence to declare nicotine an addictive drug. This is the most profound threat ever faced by the tobacco companies.

In recent months, the two efforts have merged, with FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler testifying before Waxman’s panel. The most explosive information that has come out includes allegations that cigarette companies have known their products are addictive and have manipulated nicotine levels to keep their customers hooked.

The tobacco executives have denied these assertions under oath.

If the FDA determines nicotine is indeed a drug, under the law it would then have to declare it “safe and effective” or ban it. Waxman says the agency would have no choice but to outlaw cigarettes, which the government blames for more than 400,000 deaths each year.

This specter could force the $50-billion-a-year industry to ask Waxman and other longtime, powerfully positioned adversaries to help craft compromise legislation that would empower the FDA to regulate advertising, promotion, sales and nicotine levels–in exchange for keeping cigarettes on the market.

This would be fine with Waxman. He insists he is not seeking to prohibit smoking for the nearly 50 million Americans who do so. Rather, he says he wants “to discourage people from smoking” by restricting the $4-billion-a-year campaign to market cigarettes, especially to young people, who represent the industry’s future lifeblood.

And he has sponsored legislation, which has passed his subcommittee, to restrict smoking to rooms with separate exhaust systems in all public places except bars, restaurants and prisons.

The FDA’s inquiry into regulating nicotine has begun to alter the dynamics on Capitol Hill. Thomas E. Sandefur Jr., chief executive of Brown & Williamson Tobacco, has accepted Waxman’s invitation to meet privately to discuss “reasonable regulation.” Other executives may be interested as well. Such a meeting would be a first.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that the industry is ready to embrace the diminutive lawmaker who some tobacco officials previously derided as “Hollywood Henry” –a sobriquet meant to suggest a publicity hound who was out of touch with mainstream America.

Only this week, Walker Merryman, vice president of the Tobacco Institute, described Waxman’s anti-cigarette efforts as “unmitigated zealotry, no question about that. Sort of like an 18-wheeler without brakes on the Golden State Freeway during rush hour.”

But, privately, even some tobacco advocates acknowledge that the day may come when they need the relentless Waxman, of all people, to help keep them alive.

“It would be ironic,” an industry activist mused. “We live in interesting times.”

Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton says he still plans to show up in East Lansing, Mich., next Tuesday. But if he does, it looks as if the Arkansas governor will be making a solo appearance rather than confronting President Bush face to face as the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates had hoped. The commission’s terms for debate have been rejected by the Bush campaign, forcing cancellation of next week’s encounter and quite possibly of the two others the commission has tried to arrange. Partisans can argue who gains from all this. What ought to be clear to everyone is that voters are the big losers.

The commission, headed by former Democratic Party chairman Paul G. Kirk Jr. and former Republican Party chairman Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., was formed in 1987 with the idea of taking all the partisan squabbling out of debate arrangements.

The commission proposed three 90-minute presidential debates and one debate between the vice presidential candidates, with questions put by a single moderator. Clinton accepted; Bush wants questions to be asked by a panel of journalists. That latter format allows–almost requires–shorter answers while cutting down on the opportunity for follow-up questions aimed at drawing out precise rather than general responses. By insisting on playing by its rules or refusing to play at all, the Bush camp is negating the bipartisan commission’s purpose.

FORUM OF IDEAS: Voters lose, because here for the first time in this campaign would have been a chance to gauge the candidates’ ideas for dealing with the nation’s problems through something other than carefully prepared formal statements or sound bites largely without content.

Here would have been a chance to see how well Bush and Clinton do on their feet, not just in brief responses and retorts, but in sustained exposition. Anyone who doubts that there is a public hunger for serious talk about serious problems, and a disgust with the glitz and sloganeering that most campaigning has become, is not reading the popular mood accurately.

Certainly Ross Perot sensed that hunger, which is why he encouraged a movement in his name, and certainly he senses it still, which is why as he told The Times this week he may reactivate his campaign. Perot’s biggest complaint is that neither Bush nor Clinton is talking about how he would control the swelling federal deficit, arguably the greatest drag on economic growth. He’s right; the candidates are ducking the issue, because if they were to take it on honestly they would be forced to speak about what is conventionally regarded as politically unspeakable. They would have to tell voters that the deficit can be controlled only by cutting spending, which means reducing a lot of government programs people cherish, or by increasing revenues, which means raising taxes. They won’t say that. Perot would, and in doing so he might just force Bush and Clinton finally to get specific about the deficit crisis.

TIME OF TWISTS: That would be one more twist in a campaign year that can already be seen as one of the most unusual in modern times. Two major developments are already apparent: the reshuffle facing Congress–especially the House, where come January as much as one-third of the membership may be new–and the large number of women who have entered contests for state and national offices and the large number who at this point stand a good chance at election in November. A record 11, for example, have already won primaries for Senate seats.

There will be no end to analyses about what it all means, but some preliminary judgments can be made right now. People seem increasingly to have gone from being cynical about the political process to being angry.

Incumbents are one evident target of this anger, while women candidates benefit because, among other reasons, many of them tend to be relatively new entrants into the political arena. It would be comforting to think that the shallowness and dishonesty of so much of what passes for political discourse have become no less a target of righteous public wrath. Certainly that would be one of the most positive things to take place in our political life in a very long time.

Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — When Mitt Romney launched Bain Capital in 1984, he struggled at first to raise enough money for the untested venture. Old-money families like the Rothschilds turned down the young Boston consultant.

So he and his partners tapped an eclectic roster of investors, raising more than a third of their first $37-million investment fund from wealthy foreigners.

Most of the foreign investors’ money came through corporations registered in Panama, then known for tax advantages and unusual banking secrecy.

Previously unreported details, documented in Massachusetts corporate filings and other public records, show that Bain Capital was enmeshed in the largely opaque world of international high finance from its very inception.

The documents don’t indicate any wrongdoing, and experts say that such financial vehicles are common for wealthy foreign investors. But the new details come as President Obama has criticized Romney for profiting from Bain Capital’s own offshore investment entities, which are unavailable to most Americans.

The Romney campaign declined to comment on the specifics of Bain’s early investors. Romney has argued that his offshore investments are entirely proper, and that he has paid all the U.S. taxes that he owes. The offshore funds do provide tax advantages for foreign investors, allowing Bain to attract billions of dollars.

“The world of finance is not as simple as some would have you believe,” Romney said in an interview this week with National Review Online.

The first outside investor in Bain was a leading London financier, Sir Jack Lyons, who made a $2.5-million investment through a Panama shell company set up by a Swiss money manager, further shielding his identity. Years later, Lyons was convicted in an unrelated stock fraud scandal.

About $9 million came from rich Latin Americans, including powerful Salvadoran families living in Miami during their country’s brutal civil war.

That first investment fund — used to invest in start-up companies and leveraged buyouts — paid out a stunning 173% in average annual returns over a decade, according to a prospectus prepared by an outside bank. It was the start of the private equity powerhouse that ultimately fueled Romney’s political career. He now cites his experience at Bain as a chief qualification for the White House.

Romney faced unusual complications when he launched Bain Capital, a spinoff of Bain & Co., the Boston consulting firm he joined when he graduated from Harvard Business School.

At the time, U.S. officials were publicly accusing some exiles in Miami of funding right-wing death squads in El Salvador. Some family members of the first Bain Capital investors were later linked to groups responsible for killings, though no evidence indicates those relatives invested in Bain or benefited from it.

Romney has said he checked the foreign investors’ backgrounds. His campaign and Bain Capital declined to provide specifics.

Alex Stanton, a spokesman for Bain Capital, said confidentiality rules barred him from commenting on the investors.

“The hyperbole of political campaigns cannot change the fact that Bain Capital has operated with high standards of integrity and excellence, including compliance with all applicable laws and regulations regarding the vetting of our investors in consultation with experienced counsel and other advisors,” he said. “Any suggestion to the contrary is baseless.”

Matt McDonald, a spokesman for the Romney campaign, also declined to discuss details of the original fund. “There were many investors who saw the opportunity of a firm that could help fix broken companies and help them grow.”

But when Romney and his partners started the firm, Bain & Co. founder Bill Bain — worried the new venture could fail — barred them from soliciting current clients or corporations that would have to publicly disclose the investment, according to an early Bain Capital employee.

Bain partners put in $12 million of their own money, then sought the rest from wealthy individuals.

Records show the first investment in Bain Capital — $1.25 million in June 1984 — was in the name of Jean Overseas Ltd., registered in Panama by Marcel Elfen, a Swiss money manager. Later, the investment was doubled.

The Panamanian shell company apparently was a vehicle for Lyons, the British businessman and philanthropist. Lyons died in 2008.

His son, David Lyons of Quebec, said in a phone interview that he had never heard of Jean Overseas, but he confirmed that his father was “absolutely” an early investor in Bain Capital and said that Elfen, who died last year, was his father’s money manager.

David Lyons said that wealthy Europeans like his father often invested through offshore shell corporations. “It allowed some confidentiality,” he said. “It allowed a lot of things.”

Jack Lyons worked as an outside consultant for Bain & Co., but that ended when he and three others were charged in the Guinness Affair, a stock scandal that rocked Britain. Convicted of fraud in 1990, he was spared prison time due to his failing health, but was stripped of his knighthood.

Romney and his partners also won over the money manager for one of California’s wealthiest families, the Crockers, whose family trust put in $4.8 million. Romney “was the most confident executive I’ve ever come across,” said William Swanson, who at the time managed the family’s investments.

Other early investors included Robert Maxwell, the British publishing baron, who invested $2 million. After his drowning death in 1991, investigators discovered Maxwell had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from his company’s pension funds.

But early on, the fundraising was still falling short. Harry Strachan, a Bain Capital partner who was born in Costa Rica to American missionary parents, knew Central American businessmen through his involvement in a Harvard-backed business school in Nicaragua. Why not pitch to them?

Romney and Bill Bain were initially “terrified of bringing in Central Americans,” Strachan told the Boston Globe in August 1994. “They were afraid of drug money.”

Reassured by Strachan, Romney flew to Miami to meet the group in 1984.

“My friends were impressed by Mitt and the team and signed up for 20% of the fund,” Strachan wrote in his self-published memoir, “Finding a Path.” He did not respond to requests for comment.

The group included some of El Salvador’s wealthiest people: coffee grower Miguel A. Dueñas; members of the De Sola family, also coffee exporters; and Ricardo Poma, whose family conglomerate now owns car dealerships and luxury hotels across Central America. Other investors included Frank Kardonski, who co-founded the Panama Stock Exchange, and Diego Ribadeneira, nowEcuador’sambassador to Peru.

Most of the money they put into Bain Capital was through corporations set up in Panama with names such as Velof Trust, Jolla and Universal Selling Co.

In the 1980s, Panama was “the country of choice for foreigners wanting to make investments on a confidential basis,” said Steven H. Hagen, a Miami lawyer who provides tax advice to offshore companies and international investors.

The use of an offshore corporation to invest in a U.S. business shields foreign investors from estate taxes, but not income taxes, Hagen said.

At the time, El Salvador was being torn apart in a civil war that ultimately left tens of thousands dead. The Bain investors — some of whom had their plantations seized and family members targeted — were waiting out the war in Miami.

“Many of them were trying to move their money elsewhere,” said Jeffery M. Paige, a University of Michigan professor who wrote a book about the Salvadoran ruling class. “It was a difficult transition, and of course their investment outlets were limited.”

Among the Bain investors were Francisco R.R. de Sola and his cousin Herbert Arturo de Sola, whose brother Orlando de Sola was suspected by State Department officials and the CIA of backing the right-wing death squads, according to now-declassified documents.

Orlando de Sola, who has denied supporting the death squads, is now serving a four-year prison term for unrelated fraud charges. In an interview at the prison in Metapan, El Salvador, he said he did not benefit from the family investment in Bain Capital.

Before Bain, the family’s holdings were based in El Salvador, he said. “I would say their relationship with Bain Capital was a step to diversify into foreign investments. But I insist to you, I was not part of it.”

The other Latin American investors declined or did not respond to requests to comment.

Other early investors were happy to talk about their lucrative early bet. Jack Hanley, former head ofMonsanto Co., put in $1 million.

“It seemed like a hell of a smart thing for me to do to ride their coattails,” said Hanley, now 83. “I got rich.”

joseph.tanfani@latimes.com

melanie.mason@latimes.com

matea.gold@latimes.com

Special correspondent Alex Renderos in Metapan, El Salvador, contributed to this report.

ST. LOUIS — President Clinton on Friday joined the growing cultural and political war between Democrats and their critics on the right, bitterly assailing Christian broadcasters and conservative radio talk-show hosts.

In unusually angry and aggressive remarks during a radio interview, Clinton attacked the Rev. Jerry Falwell and popular radio personality Rush Limbaugh by name, saying that their brand of politics and religion feed a spreading intolerance and cynicism across America.

The tenor and heat of his remarks showed what is increasingly becoming apparent–that for those in the roiling political battle, this is less a contest between strong adversaries with some mutual respect than a holy war fueled by bitterness and personal loathing.

Clinton spoke by telephone from Air Force One as he was flying to St. Louis to inaugurate a youth service program and headline a $1,500-a-plate fund-raiser for House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.).

The President said that televangelist Falwell and other spokesmen for the religious right hide behind their fervent protestations of faith while engaging in baseless personal attacks and political demagoguery.

“I do not believe that people should be criticized for their religious convictions,” Clinton said. “But neither do I believe that people can put on the mantle of religion and then justify anything they say or do.”

The President called Falwell’s Christian values questionable when he uses his church and his access to television to promote a videotape attacking Clinton’s honesty and morality.

Clinton said that the Falwell tape, which includes lurid allegations about Clinton’s sex life, his personal finances and assorted skullduggery in Arkansas, is full of “scurrilous and false charges.”

“Remember,” Clinton said, “Jesus threw the money-changers out of the temple. He didn’t try to take over the job of the money-changers.”

In an interview with Cable News Network later Friday, Falwell dismissed Clinton’s criticism and invited the President to tape a personal rebuttal to the videotape for use on the “Old Time Gospel Hour,” which airs on 200 stations nationwide.

“While the President should really direct his denials and apparent anger at those making the charges, we will be happy to provide him a forum for rebutting those charges, assuming he has watched the video, knows what the charges are and addresses them specifically,” Falwell said.

Clinton’s growing frustration not only with his legislative difficulties but with the unanswered attacks on his character was evident in the 23-minute interview with radio station KMOX.

He was testy from the outset, then unloaded on radio interviewers Charles Brennan and Kevin Horrigan after they asked about the alleged pilfering of towels and bathrobes from the aircraft carrier George Washington by White House staff members on the President’s recent trip to Europe to commemorate the D-day anniversary.

“Look at all the things you could have asked me about and you just asked me about that,” Clinton said, his voice rising in wrath. “Did you know that there were other people on that aircraft carrier? Did you know that there were press people on the aircraft carrier? Did you know that the carrier had been fully reimbursed out of the private pocket of a White House staff member who was so upset about it. . . ? No. No.”

White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers went out of her way to insist that Clinton was not angry. He was shouting only to be heard over the engine noise of Air Force One, she said.

“He wasn’t angry and didn’t want to leave the impression that he was,” Myers said after reading wire service accounts that described the President as inflamed. “It sounded a lot harder than it was.”

She said that Clinton did not intend to point fingers at any individuals. “I think the President just spoke his mind,” she added.

Clinton’s assault on Falwell, Limbaugh and other critics elevated to a new plane a battle that Rep. Vic Fazio (D-West Sacramento) launched earlier this week with an attack on the Republican Party and its supporters from the “intolerant . . . religious right.”

Fazio warned that radical fringe groups are seizing control of the GOP in more than a dozen states and are threatening to become a major force in Congress.

Fazio’s comments were denounced by Republican leaders as “religious bigotry” and a “calculated smear campaign.”

It was clear Friday that Clinton would join Fazio’s line of attack as part of the Democratic Party strategy to demonize the right and stanch Democratic losses in the November mid-term elections.

The President said he respects the religious convictions of evangelicals but that he would not be silent “when people come into the political system and they say that anybody that doesn’t agree with them is Godless, anyone who doesn’t agree with them is not a good Christian, anyone who doesn’t agree with them is fair game for any wild charge, no matter how false, for any kind of personal, demeaning attack.”

The Falwell tape sells for $43, and tens of thousands reportedly have been sold. The people quoted on the tape are several longtime enemies of Clinton who, among other things, suggest that Clinton was involved in several murders in Arkansas.

Falwell aide Mark DeMoss has said that he does not know if the charges are true but believes they should be aired so they can be investigated.

House Republicans also responded to Clinton’s comments. “People who go to work on Monday and church on Sunday are not public enemies,” said Rep. Dick Armey (R-Tex.), who chairs the House GOP Conference. “Clinton should be putting an end to this McCarthyistic tactic now, rather than fanning the flames and setting up some religious right bogeyman.”

The mainstream media also did not escape Friday’s presidential ire. Clinton complained that the reporting on his Administration has emphasized its failures unfairly and ignored its accomplishments.

He said that news reporting today is “much more negative . . , much more editorial . . . and much less direct” than ever before.

And he said that the American people were subjected to a “constant unremitting drumbeat of negativism and cynicism” from talk radio–particularly Limbaugh and his many imitators.

Clinton noted that the three-hour Limbaugh show would follow him on the same radio station and that he would have no opportunity for response or challenge.

“And there’s no truth detector,” Clinton said. “You won’t get on afterwards and say what was true and what wasn’t.”

Limbaugh, in his show Friday, answered the President mockingly, “There is no need for a truth detector. I am the truth detector.”

Clinton said that he had given up hope of receiving better treatment from the press, the religious broadcasters and talk radio.

“So I decided instead of being frustrated, I needed to be aggressive and I’m going to be aggressive from here on in. I’m going to tell what I know the truth to be,” Clinton said.

So no more Mr. Nice Guy?

“I’m going to be very nice about it,” the President said, “but I’m going to be aggressive about it.”

Times staff writer Jeff Leeds in Washington contributed to this story.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joe Biden has turned to one of his most trusted and long-serving foreign policy advisors as his choice for secretary of State.

Biden is expected to nominate Antony Blinken, 58, a veteran diplomat and former senior official at the State Department and National Security Council, perhaps on Tuesday, according to a source familiar with the Biden transition planning.

The Democratic president-elect has said he could announce his choices for several positions this week, as he moves to form a Cabinet and his administration more broadly despite President Trump’s refusal to concede his election defeat.

Blinken is seen as someone who could easily win Senate confirmation even if Republicans still control the chamber in the next Congress. Given the depth of his experience, he could hit the ground running, current and former diplomats said.

Blinken was a deputy national security advisor and deputy secretary of State in the Obama administration as well as national security advisor to Vice President Biden from 2009 to 2013.

The stepson of a Holocaust survivor, Blinken has leaned more toward intervention in world crises than some of his colleagues, but is also facile in readjusting his position to match that of the administration he serves. He is known as fiercely loyal to Biden.

Blinken has also advised Biden during his presidential campaigns, serving during the just-concluded campaign as Biden’s principal foreign policy advisor and spokesman.

“Joe Biden will benefit just by not being President Trump,” Blinken said in an interview with The Times during the summer. “That is the opening opportunity.”

Bloomberg, which first reported the likely Blinken nomination, also said Jake Sullivan, 43, formerly one of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides as well as an advisor to Biden, is likely to be named national security advisor, a White House staff position that does not require Senate confirmation.

Ron Klain, Biden’s incoming White House chief of staff, said Sunday that the president-elect would be making his initial cabinet announcements on Tuesday, but declined to specify which positions would be filled first. The people familiar with Biden’s selections asked not to be identified because he hasn’t yet made the announcements.

State is regarded as one of the most prestigious Cabinet posts. The secretary of State is the nation’s top diplomat, conducting meetings with foreign leaders across the globe.

The president’s national security advisor is one of the most important and powerful jobs in the White House, leading a staff of dozens of experts drawn from the government’s military, diplomatic and intelligence agencies who develop U.S. foreign and military policy.

Blinken and Sullivan didn’t respond to requests for comment. A Biden spokesman declined to comment.

When Biden was a senator and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Blinken served as his staff director before leaving to work on Biden’s short-lived 2008 presidential campaign. Blinken graduated from Harvard and from Columbia Law School.

After serving in the Obama administration, Blinken co-founded WestExec Advisors, a political strategy firm, with a top Obama-era Pentagon official, Michele Flournoy. She is a top candidate to be Biden’s Defense secretary; if named and confirmed, she would be the first woman to hold the job.

Biden met on Nov. 17 with defense and intelligence experts, including Blinken and others who worked for Obama when Biden was vice president. He gathered them together because the Trump administration has blocked him from getting the intelligence briefings traditionally granted the president-elect.

“We’ve been through a lot of damage done over the last four years, in my view. We need to rebuild our institutions and my workforce to reflect the full strength and diversity of our country,” Biden said at the briefing. “We need to focus on readiness for whatever may come.”

Times staff writer Evan Halper and Bloomberg News contributed to this report.

ATLANTA — Lloyd Bentsen, a tall Texan with a mission to protect the Democratic Party’s right flank, was nominated for vice president Thursday night, and he had a message for America: It is time to wake up and go to work.

“My friends, America has just passed through the ultimate epoch of illusion: An eight-year coma in which slogans were confused with solutions and rhetoric passed for reality, a time when America tried to borrow its way to prosperity,” the 67-year-old U.S. senator told the Democratic convention delegates.

‘Epoch of Illusion’ Ending

In a speech that depicted the Democrats as a new party of competence and frugality, Bentsen said: “At long last the epoch of illusion is drawing to a close. America is ready for the honest, proven, hands-on leadership of Michael Dukakis backed up by the power of a united, committed Democratic Party.”

A Texas-Size Night

It wasn’t just a big night, it was a Texas-size night for Bentsen, a dapper politician who until now has seen more of the inner sanctums of the Senate than the national spotlight. Suddenly he is in the spotlight and on the ticket with the presidential nominee, Michael S. Dukakis, in what many believe is the most united Democratic Party in 24 years.

But Bentsen was ready, striding into the gaze of a curious public with the looks, the soothing voice and the self-assurance of a senator who might have been created by Hollywood. In the audience was his 94-year-old father, “Big Lloyd,” who reared his son to shoot straight and ride fast in the Rio Grande Valley.

Also in the audience were some delegates whose concern about Bentsen reflected what an odd couple he and Dukakis make. The senator disagrees with the governor on a number of major issues, including the MX missile and aid for the Nicaraguan Contras, both of which Bentsen supports and Dukakis opposes.

“I will support Bentsen on the ticket,” said Vernice Garrison, a California delegate who held up a “No on Contra Aid” sign. “But I want him to know how I feel about Contra aid.”

Lack of Enthusiasm Noted

There was a noticeable lack of enthusiasm for Bentsen among some supporters of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who believed that their man should have been picked as vice president because he got 7 million votes, and won more than 1,200 delegates in the primaries and caucuses.

Some Jackson supporters in the New Jersey delegation wanted to stage a protest over Bentsen’s position on the Contras, but Jackson’s floor leaders were instructed to prevent that, according to Newark Mayor Sharpe James.

It was also clear that Bentsen’s plain speaking style will not upstage Dukakis in this campaign. Some delegates chatted through the entire address.

Dukakis picked the more conservative Bentsen in part to offset his more liberal Northeastern image. He also wants him to take the battle to Texas, the adopted home state of the expected GOP nominee, Vice President George Bush, where 29 electoral votes are at stake.

But Bentsen has never been known as an attacker and that was evident in his speech. He criticized the Reagan-Bush Administration without ridiculing it, zeroing in on what he believes are its flaws without dwelling too long on the downside.

And, although Bentsen has made fun of Bush on occasion and says he looks forward to challenging him on their home turf in the oil-producing states, his speech indicated that he does not intend to be overly harsh.

“Lloyd Bentsen is not going to be the hatchet man of this campaign,” said Texas political consultant George Christian, who helped Bentsen draft his speech.

‘They’re Good Friends’

“I was involved in Lloyd’s 1970 Senate race with Bush and to my knowledge he never did really attack Bush,” Christian said. “They’re good friends. But there is going to be good honest criticism of the Administration in this campaign, and it has to be done sharply.”

“Democrats agree that the American worker who has struggled for 20 years to support his or her family has earned 60 days’ notice if management plans to shut down that plant. But the Reagan-Bush Administration insists that a pink slip in the mail is notice enough,” Bentsen said in a reference to a plant-closing bill that the Reagan Administration recently opposed.

Bentsen and Dukakis believe the differences between the two political parties on that legislation could be crucial in luring back many working-class Democrats who supported Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 and are expressing doubts about Bush in opinion polls.

Bentsen and Dukakis are aware, however, that they may have trouble convincing some middle class voters that these are difficult times, given the sustained economic growth and low unemployment under Reagan.

Targeting Specific Group

So, as Bentsen’s speech showed, they are aiming for that portion of the middle class that is struggling or is at least apprehensive about the future.

“I see the charts and numbers that suggest prosperity,” Bentsen said. “But I also talk with people and I hear what they have to say.

“I know that if you are a teacher or a factory worker, or if you are just starting a family, it’s almost impossible to buy a house–no matter how hard you work or how carefully you plan. A college education is slipping beyond the reach of millions of hard-working Americans.”

Then, in a sales job for Dukakis and his record as governor, Bentsen said: “Michael Dukakis . . . turned around the economy of Massachusetts, not by writing hot checks but by careful management of the taxpayers’ dollar and a healthy respect for the entrepreneurial system.”

Bentsen was nominated for vice president by longtime Bentsen ally Rep. Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

The nomination was seconded by former Texas Rep. Barbara Jordan, a widely admired black leader whom Bentsen aides described as one of the senator’s home state heroes, and by Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, one of a group of young senators elected recently by the Democrats. Daschle’s home state is where Bentsen’s Danish forebears settled in the 19th Century. His father, Lloyd Sr., moved from South Dakota to Texas in the 1920s and built a ranching and real estate empire from scratch.

Introduced by Glenn

Bentsen was introduced by Ohio Sen. John Glenn, the No. 1 “bridesmaid” among those other Democrats Dukakis was considering for vice president. “I just knew I’d be making a speech tonight about the vice presidency,” Glenn joked, and then went on to praise his Senate colleague as “a real Texan” who is “superbly qualified for the job.”

Ironically, Glenn’s short, tough speech, which cheered Bentsen and ridiculed Bush, appeared to be one of the best he has ever given, the kind that, delivered sooner, could have put to rest the doubts of Dukakis’ aides about Glenn’s campaigning ability.

Glenn received a very enthusiastic reception, better than Bentsen’s. The delegates also cheered Jordan, who described Bentsen as a man with “an instinct for doing what is right,” an allusion to his civil rights record, which is much better than that of many Southern white leaders of his generation.

With the senator’s father in the convention hall were Bentsen’s wife, Beryl Ann, their sons, Lloyd III and Lan, and their daughter, Tina Bentsen Smith.

Bentsen wrote his speech with the help of his former Senate aide Stephen Ward. Christian, former press secretary to President Lyndon B. Johnson, helped hone the address. According to Christian and Jack DeVore, Bentsen Senate press secretary, the Dukakis campaign offered little in the way of suggestions.

Defers to Senator

“Dukakis trusts Lloyd,” Christian said. Reporters following the two men in the last week have found that, despite their differences on some key issues, they seem comfortable, if not gregarious, together. Dukakis has been seen deferring to the senator in several situations involving members of the House and Senate who are attending the convention.

At the end of his speech, Bentsen, a multimillionaire, thanks to real estate and other businesses, told his audience that his forebears had started out in a sod hut in South Dakota.

“They made their way in America,” Bentsen said. “That’s the American dream we have nourished for 200 years, the dream of freedom and opportunity, the chance for a step up in life. I want to help Michael Dukakis protect that dream for the next generation.”

Staff writers John Balzar, Bob Drogin, Patt Morrison, David Lauter and Henry Weinstein contributed to this story.

This week, the Senate Finance Committee took up hearings on mergers, takeovers, leveraged buyouts, corporate debt and other assorted sins often blamed on Wall Street.

Next week, the powerful House Ways and Means Committee follows suit, and at least seven other committees seem to be gearing up.

While it brings back memories of past inquisitions of investment bankers, by comparison this show is headed for an unspectacular run.

Only two previous congressional investigations stand out in American history for their far-ranging impact on the behavior of Wall Street and on public opinion. In 1912, Sen. Arsene P. Pujo of Louisiana turned a prolonged spotlight on alleged conspiracies among New York-based financiers to create and control big “money trusts” like U.S. Steel.

Despite its effective muckraking antics, the Pujo committee’s work did not in itself lead to new laws. But sweeping new banking legislation, including the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, followed soon after.

In 1933 the Senate Banking and Currency Committee launched the Pecora hearings–named not for a senator but for Ferdinand Pecora, the legal counsel–which put investment bankers on trial for fraud and other abuses during the booming 1920s. Pecora’s efforts led to milestone legislation that separated commercial lending from investment banking, created new rules for the securities business and set up the Securities and Exchange Commission.

There are, however, great differences between Congress’ past efforts and what will happen now.

Unlike today’s situation, the hearings of 1912 and 1933 were heavily driven by nonelected, firebrand prosecutors with independent political agendas. Pujo had Samuel Untermeyer, one of the country’s top trial lawyers who became wealthy creating mergers and then sought political fortune by tearing them apart. Pecora, a New Deal Democrat, had been a prominent Bull Moose Progressive in New York.

In the Pujo and Pecora eras, the balance of power between Washington and Wall Street was moving toward Pennsylvania Avenue. While in the early 1900s the House of Morgan and a few others single-handedly controlled American finance, by the second decade the government was wising up. Again in the 1920s private markets were running wild, but the Great Crash of ’29 ended all that.

In the late 1980s, however, the markets rule again. A deregulated, global financial casino that sees $200 billion of foreign currency speculation each day has the upper hand over governments. Congress recognizes this and is paranoid about setting off Wall Street’s hair trigger.

In the past, Congress could push for broad policy changes because financial regulations were so primitive. Pujo, for example, had no real authority to compel officials of Kidder, Peabody and other firms to disclose their business records. Before Pecora there were hardly any federal constraints on investment banking.

But today Washington maintains the world’s most elaborate regulatory regime, and hardly anyone advocates wholesale reform. Some measures, such as tax changes, may be required to reduce the attractiveness of financing deals with so much debt. But this will have to be done with great delicacy and, in any event, it is not technically a securities issue.

A common refrain for Pujo and Pecora was the evil of concentration and monopoly on Wall Street. It has always been good populist politics to wail about lack of competition among the investment banks and about the dominance of financiers over the industrial corporations that make goods and create jobs.

But these days the Merrill Lynches, the Shearsons and the Salomons compete ferociously. And few would challenge the need for size and concentration to compete with the Nomuras or the Deutschebanks.

As for whether Wall Street has the nation’s corporate titans on a leash, who can really say, when the management of so many companies and their investment bankers team up to take over someone else–or, as in the case of R.J.R. Nabisco, when they collaborate to buy management’s very own company from its public shareholders?

During past congressional hearings, the executive branch has not been a wallflower. Pujo could ride on the waves of Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting and Woodrow Wilson’s crusading idealism. Pecora had Franklin D. Roosevelt and New Deal government activism. While President Bush has been making kinder and gentler noises about reexamining the LBO scene, its hard to envision dramatic departures. Its not just that Bush & Co. are moderates. But in today’s greed-glorifying culture, there is little push from outside the Washington Beltway to clobber the money men.

Finally, Pujo and especially Pecora were reacting to financial debacles, in one case the recurrent turn-of-the-century financial panics and, in the other, the Crash of ’29. With October of ’87 but a footnote in history, and with the Justice Department moving enthusiastically to lock up insider traders, there is today no real lightning rod for outrage.

Merger and LBO mania may be leading to severe problems, to be sure, especially if a recession hits and topples all those debt-laden firms. But Congress has never distinguished itself by locking the barn door early. That didn’t happen in Pujo’s or Pecora’s time, and who would bet that it will do so in ours?

christine.maiduc@latimes.com

For more on California politics, follow @cmaiduc.

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Updates on California politics

UPDATES:

2 p.m.: This article was updated to clarify that Fight Back California is targeting 30,000 voters in each of the seven districts.

This article was originally published at 3 a.m.

The House Armed Services Committee approved a bill authorizing $601.4 billion in defense spending for next year, including a 3.9% pay raise for troops.

The pay increase and other service benefits — such as a prohibition on increased healthcare fees — is more than President Bush wants. But it is in sync with a broader election-year effort by lawmakers to boost benefits for service members and veterans.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has proposed a similar defense bill that includes the 3.9% pay increase — all but guaranteeing the provision will be included in the final bill and sent to Bush for his signature this summer.

The legislation covers the 2009 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.

CAIRO — Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi sat at the head of the ornate room, on a chair that seemed slightly bigger than the rest, thronelike. Even through his COVID mask, it was clear he was not smiling.

His visitor, the first envoy from the new Biden administration, was relegated to the side chairs with other members of the U.S. and Egyptian delegations.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken had called on the notorious strongman, a military man whom former President Trump once called his “favorite dictator,” to thank him for helping stop a war between Israel and the militant group Hamas.

It was an awkward position for Blinken. Human rights, he has said repeatedly, are at the core of Biden-era foreign policy — and human rights are not something Sisi regards favorably. He jails and tortures dissidents, journalists and others, activists say, and has been accused of repeatedly ordering deadly fire on peaceful demonstrators.

But Sisi, as Egyptian leaders have before him, helped defuse violence between Israel and Palestinian groups. So Blinken made the high-level visit to offer thanks, which Sisi will attempt to leverage to influence Washington and to skirt criticism. During his campaign, President Biden promised “no blank checks” for Sisi, but Egypt has long parlayed its recognition of Israel into an alliance in which U.S. officials tended to look the other way when it came to abuses.

“Egypt played a crucial role in brokering the cease-fire,” Blinken said later in discussing his meeting with Sisi. He insisted that he raised human rights issues with the Egyptian leader. “We had a lengthy exchange on that with President Al Sisi as a reflection of the fact that it remains very much on the agenda with Egypt.”

Before the meeting late last month, reports had circulated among diplomats that Sisi would release a number of detained American citizens as a good-faith gesture. That did not happen.

Blinken and Sisi met for one hour and 45 minutes, with Sisi speaking for more than an hour without interruption, according to people familiar with the encounter. He extolled his own achievements in what he considers true human rights: making daily life better for ordinary Egyptians. Political rights or the right to dissent do not figure in his narrative.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, left, is seated to the side during a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi at the Heliopolis Palace in Cairo on May 26.

(Associated Press)

Journalists accompanying Blinken on his trip were given about 30 seconds to view the initial seating of the meeting, but no more. Once during an earlier visit, Vice President Mike Pence answered a question from the attending journalists and invited Sisi to join in. The Egyptian was appalled at such openness, refused to engage and subsequently fired several palace aides who he blamed for allowing such an affront, according to diplomats.

This time, Sisi’s supporters in the mostly state-controlled Egyptian media celebrated Blinken’s visit and two telephone calls from Biden as validation of the government’s tactics and its recovered importance to regional diplomacy.

Critics said the diplomatic niceties obscure the ruthlessness of the government.

Sisi, 66, a former minister of defense and head of military intelligence, began his rise to power in a July 2013 coup against democratically chosen President Mohamed Morsi, and eventually won election as president in 2014.

After gaining power, Sisi jettisoned the Egyptian Constitution, unleashed brutally lethal security forces on massive civilian protests in Cairo and kept power through a 2018 vote widely seen as fraudulent.

Human Rights Watch, in an extensive report, held Sisi at least partially to blame for a massacre of hundreds of government critics, including many Muslim Brotherhood members, in July and August of 2013.

“His utmost concern is the sustainability of his regime, with him at the top of that regime, and he is ready to do whatever he can for the sustainability of the regime,” said Bahey eldin Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, which has repeatedly urged the Sisi government to end its crackdown on peaceful dissent.

Sisi sees enemies everywhere, Hassan and other human rights experts said — especially from among Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood that backed Morsi, and activists who would hold him accountable for repeated killings of dissidents. Sisi does not tolerate internal debate, much less public criticism, said people who know him.

Hassan fled to France after the Sisi judiciary prosecuted him twice for what he says was his work on behalf of human rights. The activist blames decades of U.S. “political support and complicity” for strengthening the hands of autocratic Egyptian rulers. Egypt receives roughly $1.3 billion annually in military aid, second only to Israel, and the Biden administration is asking for the same amount for next fiscal year.

“I’d just like President Biden to keep his promises from the campaign,” Hassan said in a telephone interview, referring to Biden’s pledge to work to free tens of thousands of political prisoners said to have been detained under Sisi.

Egypt has for decades enjoyed a unique spot in U.S. foreign policy and the geopolitics of the Middle East.

Through successive U.S. administrations, Washington upheld a string of Egyptian strongmen, from the late Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, to Sisi now. Until last year, Egypt, along with Jordan, was one of only two Arab nations to recognize Israel. That vital role led Washington to ignore many of the abuses of Cairo governments while enlisting their help in protecting Israel.

The role came into focus again last month when it took Sisi and Egypt to persuade the militant Hamas organization based in the Gaza Strip to agree to stop its rocket fire onto Israeli cities and towns. Israel responded with heavy aerial bombardment that devastated parts of the Gaza Strip including residential buildings and schools. Because the U.S. formally regards Hamas as a terrorist group, it cannot negotiate with its leaders directly.

For Sisi, it was a welcome opportunity to prove his mettle to the Biden administration and to counter a shift in U.S. attentions to Persian Gulf nations after several agreed to recognize Israel as part of the 2020 Abraham Accords brokered by the Trump administration.

“Egypt is working hard on reclaiming and cementing its role as a significant international player that can be an ally, rather than a liability,” Mirette Mabrouk, founding director of the Egypt program at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, wrote in a recent analysis.

That includes Sisi’s intervention in Libya, where he has sought to mediate among warring factions, and in the debate over a massive dam on the Nile that pits Egypt against Ethiopia and Sudan.

Sisi was unsure of the Biden administration, experts said, following four years of latitude under Trump.

For example, Blinken’s predecessor called on Sisi in January 2019. And rather than raise human rights issues, Trump’s secretary of State, Michael R. Pompeo, praised Sisi for what he called an embrace of religious freedom because he had allowed a Coptic Christian church to be built in a Cairo suburb. (Shortly thereafter, Egypt built a mosque nearby.)

Under pressure from the Trump administration and advocacy groups, Sisi last year released an American arts teacher who had been detained for 300 days, Reem Desouky. But another U.S. citizen, Moustafa Kassem, died in Egyptian custody. The United Nations estimates that there are half a dozen Americans among the tens of thousands of political prisoners in Egypt.

Sisi hopes his ability to influence Hamas will help keep Washington off his back, said Nimrod Novik, an Israeli foreign policy analyst who worked for the late Prime Minister Shimon Peres and has continued close ties with Egyptian intelligence officials.

“He was very apprehensive about the dual phenomenon of a Biden administration and a Democratic Congress,” Novik, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Israel Policy Forum advocacy group, said in an interview. “There was great concern on that score: America is back, and human rights are back.”

Administration officials reject the idea that Sisi will be able to leverage his usefulness in Hamas negotiations to thwart their concern about human rights. They are able to address the issues in compartmentalized ways, they say.

“President Biden takes the issue of human rights and our commitment to human rights very seriously,” Blinken said in a news conference. “Indeed, he’s asked us to put it at the heart of our foreign policy, and that’s exactly what we’re doing, and that was reflected in the conversations that we had” with Sisi.

A federal judge this week canceled the trial of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man who was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration, and scheduled a hearing on whether the prosecution is being vindictive in pursuing a human smuggling case against him.

Abrego Garcia has become a centerpiece of the debate over immigration after the Trump administration deported him in March to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Facing mounting public pressure and a court order, the Trump administration brought him back to the U.S. in June, but only after issuing an arrest warrant on human smuggling charges in Tennessee.

Abrego Garcia has denied the allegations, and argued that prosecutors are vindictively and selectively targeting him. Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. wrote in Tuesday’s order that Abrego Garcia had provided enough evidence to hold a hearing on the topic, which Crenshaw scheduled for Jan. 28.

At that hearing, prosecutors will have to explain their reasoning for charging Abrego Garcia, Crenshaw wrote, and if they fail in that, the charges could be dismissed.

When Abrego Garcia was pulled over in 2022, there were nine passengers in the car, and the officers discussed among themselves their suspicions of smuggling. But Abrego Garcia was eventually allowed to continue driving with only a warning.

A Department of Homeland Security agent previously testified that he did not begin investigating the traffic stop until after the U.S. Supreme Court said in April that the Trump administration had to work to bring Abrego Garcia from El Salvador, where he was deported.

Years earlier, Abrego Garcia had been granted protection from deportation to his home country after a judge found he faced danger there from a gang that targeted his family. That order allowed Abrego Garcia, who has an American wife and child, to live and work in the U.S. under Immigration and Customs Enforcement supervision.

The Trump administration has accused Abrego Garcia of being a member of the MS-13 gang. He has denied the accusations and has no criminal record.

Abrego Garcia’s defense attorney and the U.S. attorney’s office in Nashville did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Bedayn writes for the Associated Press.

As Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley seeks to become the state’s next attorney general, a dominant issue in the campaign has been his approach to the state’s three-strikes law, with his two Republican opponents seeking to cast him as being soft on crime.

Cooley defends his policy of generally not pursuing life sentences for relatively minor offenses, saying that justice requires that the punishment should fit the crime. His approach has won widespread support during three successful election campaigns for district attorney but has also drawn fire from critics who say his policy fails to adequately protect society from repeat offenders.

One of the clearest examples of the risks involved is the case of Gilton Beltrand Pitre, a convicted rapist who in 2007 went on to kill a homeless teenage girl whose body was dumped in a Silver Lake alley.

Pitre was found guilty of her murder last month and details of his criminal history were laid out in a court record filed by prosecutors last week.

Two years before the murder, Pitre had been eligible for prosecution under the state’s “three-strikes” law when he was charged with a felony for selling $5 worth of marijuana to an undercover police officer. His two strikes included a 1994 residential burglary and a 1996 rape.

Under the law, prosecutors could have sought a sentence of 25 years to life in prison. Instead, Pitre was allowed to plead guilty to a drug crime in exchange for a 32-month prison sentence, court records show.

Alyssa Gomez, 15, was killed four days after Pitre was released from prison. Prosecutors say Pitre visited the Olive Motel on Sunset Boulevard with the teenage runaway, who had been living on the streets since she was 12.

Her lifeless body, wrapped in a bedspread from the motel, was discovered the next morning in an alley behind a restaurant. Prosecutors said Pitre had sex with the girl and then strangled her.

Pitre, 38, was scheduled to be sentenced for the girl’s murder on Thursday but the hearing was postponed until July 14.

Head Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael A. Yglecias defended the office’s handling of the 2005 drug case. He said the 32-month prison sentence was appropriate given the relatively minor nature of that crime.

Yglecias noted that Pitre’s rape conviction was at the time the only violent crime in his background. Prosecutors, he said, consider not just the office’s policy when they decide how to pursue a case but also whether a judge would probably impose a potential life sentence for such a crime.

“The overriding feature in this case was that it was a sale of $5 of marijuana,” he said. “That’s pretty much what dictated the outcome.”

A district attorney’s spokeswoman said Cooley declined to comment on Pitre’s case. But his campaign strategist, Kevin Spillane, said that Los Angeles County is among the state’s top three counties when it comes to convictions for three-strikes cases.

“The reality is that the D.A.’s office is aggressive about pursuing three-strikes cases,” Spillane said. “Tens of thousands of criminals go through the D.A.’s office. It’s always easy to find someone who recommits.”

Mike Reynolds, who helped draft the 1994 three-strikes law after the murder of his 18-year-old daughter, blamed Cooley’s policy for the decision not to seek a longer sentence for Pitre.

Although district attorneys around the state are typically cautious about seeking possible life sentences for eligible third-strikers accused of relatively minor crimes, Reynolds said Cooley’s policy goes too far. He said Pitre’s rape conviction provided compelling evidence that he was a danger to society.

“You’re literally playing Russian roulette politically with every one of these guys that you let out,” said Reynolds, who has endorsed state Sen. Tom Harman of Huntington Beach in the June 8 primary race with Cooley and former law school dean John Eastman.

Under the three-strikes law, a judge can sentence an offender to 25 years to life in prison even for a nonviolent felony, such as petty theft or drug possession, as long as the offender’s criminal history includes at least two violent or serious crimes.

It is unclear from the court file whether the prosecutor who oversaw Pitre’s 2005 plea bargain realized he was eligible for a three-strikes sentence. Deputy Dist. Atty. Marlene Sanchez did not return calls seeking comment.

Under Cooley’s policy, prosecutors can seek permission from supervisors to pursue a third-strike sentence even for a minor felony. Yglecias said that was not done in Pitre’s case and that such requests are usually granted when offenders have lengthier criminal records.

“While the three-strikes law gives us a great tool … the present crime has to have the most weight,” Yglecias said. “If not, then we would be talking about the other extreme. Why is the D.A.’s office seeking 25 years to life against a guy who stole a slice of pizza? … There has to be a balance.”

Pitre’s strikes began with the burglary of his mother’s home, when he stole a television set that he sold for $40 to support a cocaine habit, according to a sentencing memorandum filed by prosecutors last week in the murder case. He was sentenced to two years in prison.

Two years later, in 1996, Pitre attacked his roommate and began strangling her with the cord from some Venetian blinds, according to a memo.

Pitre told the victim he was going to rape and kill her and that he had killed before, the memo said. He took her to a bathtub that he had filled with water and said she could choose whether she wanted to be choked or drowned. Then he raped and sodomized her.

After the attack, Pitre told the victim he planned to kill her so he would not have to go to jail. The victim dissuaded him by feigning a romantic interest and reminding him she had a young daughter, the memo said.

Pitre pleaded no contest to rape and was sentenced to three years in prison.

In the murder case, the district attorney’s office highlighted details about the rape to argue in court papers that Pitre is a “violent, predatory recidivist who falls squarely within the spirit of the three-strikes law.”

jack.leonard@latimes.com

richard.winton@latimes.com

WASHINGTON — Samuel A. Alito Jr. was quickly branded a hard-core conservative after President Bush announced his nomination, but a surprising number of liberal-leaning judges and ex-clerks say they support his elevation to the Supreme Court.

Those who have worked alongside him say he was neither an ideologue nor a judge with an agenda, conservative or otherwise. They caution against attaching a label to Alito.

Kate Pringle, a New York lawyer who worked last year on Sen. John F. Kerry’s presidential campaign, describes herself as a left-leaning Democrat and a big fan of Alito’s.

She worked for him as a law clerk in 1994, and said she was troubled by the initial reaction to his nomination. “He was not, in my personal experience, an ideologue. He pays attention to the facts of cases and applies the law in a careful way. He is conservative in that sense; his opinions don’t demonstrate an ideological slant,” she said.

Jeff Wasserstein, a Washington lawyer who clerked for Alito in 1998, echoes her view.

“I am a Democrat who always voted Democratic, except when I vote for a Green candidate — but Judge Alito was not interested in the ideology of his clerks,” he said. “He didn’t decide cases based on ideology, and his record was not extremely conservative.”

As an example, he cited a case in which police in Pennsylvania sent out a bulletin that called for the arrest of a black man in a black sports car. Police stopped such a vehicle and found a gun, but Alito voted to overturn the man’s conviction, saying that that general identification did not amount to probable cause.

“This was a classic case of ‘driving while black,’ ” Wasserstein said, referring to the complaint that black motorists are targeted by police. Though Alito “was a former prosecutor, he was very fair and open-minded in looking at cases and applying the law,” Wasserstein said.

It is not unusual for former law clerks to have fond recollections of the judge they worked for. And it is common for judges to speak respectfully of their colleagues. But for a judge being portrayed by the right and left as a hard-right conservative, Alito’s enthusiastic backing by liberal associates is striking.

Former federal Judge Timothy K. Lewis said that when he joined the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in 1992, he consulted his mentor, Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. The late Higginbotham, a legendary liberal and a scholar of U.S. racial history, was the only other black judge on the Philadelphia-based court at the time.

“As he was going down the roster of colleagues, he got to Sam Alito. I expressed some concern about [him] being so conservative. He said, ‘No, no. Sam Alito is my favorite judge to sit with on this court. He is a wonderful judge and a terrific human being. Sam Alito is my kind of conservative. He is intellectually honest. He doesn’t have an agenda. He is not an ideologue,’ ” Higginbotham said, according to Lewis.

“I really was surprised to hear that, but my experience with him on the 3rd Circuit bore that out,” added Lewis, who had a liberal record during his seven years on the bench. “Alito does not have an agenda, contrary to what the Republican right is saying about him being a ‘home run.’ He is not result-oriented. He is an honest conservative judge who believes in judicial restraint and judicial deference.”

In January 1998, Alito, joined by Judge Lewis, ruled that a Pennsylvania police officer had no probable cause to stop a black man driving a sports car after a rash of robberies in which two black males allegedly fled in a different type of sports car. The driver, Jesse Kithcart, was indicted for being a felon in possession of a gun, which police discovered when they patted him down after his car was stopped. After a trial judge refused to suppress the search, Kithcart pleaded guilty but reserved his right to appeal.

“Armed with information that two black males driving a black sports car were believed to have committed three robberies in the area some relatively short time earlier,” the police officer “could not justifiably arrest any African-American man who happened to drive by in any type of black sports car,” Alito wrote. He said the trial judge had erred in concluding that the police had probable cause that extended to the weapons charge because Kithcart had not been involved in the robberies.

Alito and Lewis sent the case back to the trial judge for new hearings on whether the search was legal. The third judge in the case, Theodore A. McKee, said he would have gone even further.

“Just as this record fails to establish” that the officer “had probable cause to arrest any black male who happened to drive by in a black sports car, it also fails to establish reasonable suspicion to justify stopping any and all such cars that happened to contain a black male,” wrote Judge McKee. He said he would have thrown out the search without further proceedings.

Judge Edward R. Becker, former chief judge of the 3rd Circuit, said he also was surprised to see Alito labeled as a reliable conservative.

“I found him to be a guy who approached every case with an open mind. I never found him to have an agenda,” he said. “I suppose the best example of that is in the area of criminal procedure. He was a former U.S. attorney, but he never came to a case with a bias in favor of the prosecution. If there was an error in the trial, or a flawed search, he would vote to reverse,” Becker said.

Some of his former clerks say they were drawn to Alito because of his reputation as a careful judge who closely followed the text of the law.

Clark Lombardi, now a law professor at the University of Washington, became a clerk for Alito in 1999.

“I grew up in New York City, and I’m a political independent. But I liked Judge Alito because he was a judicial conservative, someone who believed in judicial restraint and was committed to textualism,” he said. “His approach leads to conservative results in some cases and progressive results in other cases. In my opinion, he is a fantastic jurist and a good guy.”

Some of Alito’s former Yale Law School classmates who describe themselves as Democrats say they expect they will not always agree with his rulings if he joins the Supreme Court. But they say he is the best they could have hoped for from among Bush’s potential nominees.

“Sam is very smart, and he is unquestionably conservative,” said Washington lawyer Mark I. Levy, who served in the Justice Department during the Carter and Clinton administrations. “But he is open-minded and fair. And he thinks about cases as a lawyer and a judge. He is really very different from [Justice Antonin] Scalia. If he is going to be like anyone on the court now, it will be John Roberts,” the new chief justice.

Joel Friedman teaches labor and employment law at Tulane University Law School, but is temporarily at the University of Pittsburgh because of Tulane’s shutdown following Hurricane Katrina.

“Ideology aside, I think he is a terrific guy, a terrific choice,” said Friedman, a Yale classmate of Alito’s. “He is not Harriet Miers; he has unimpeachable credentials. He may disagree with me on many legal issues — I am a Democrat; I didn’t vote for Bush. I would not prefer any of the people Bush has appointed up until now.

“The question is, is this guy [Alito] going to be motivated by the end and find a means to get to the end, or is he going to reach an end through thoughtful analysis of all relevant factors? In my judgment, Sam will be the latter.”

*

Savage reported from Washington and Weinstein from Los Angeles.

I have been reading in The Times for over a year that California’s economy is doing great and that we have a state budget surplus. Isn’t this surplus in cash? Then why is the voter being asked to approve bonds for schools, libraries, parks and clean water?

I’ve also been reading that one should apply any extra cash to pay down high-interest debts and that, to ensure financial security, one should be careful about spending and to try to save a little for the future. Does this only apply to individuals and not to governments?

KATHRYN FONG ROUSH

Granada Hills

*

Not much is said about Prop. 16, the veterans bond. If passed, bonds will be sold to pay for retirement homes for American veterans. I will be voting yes on Prop. 16, and I urge you to do the same. These veterans served our country with honor. They were ready to sacrifice their lives for us, and I’m sure we can sacrifice a few bucks for them now, when they need our help.

AMUL PANDYA

Moorpark

Reporting from Sacramento — Sworn in Tuesday as California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra said he will team up with his counterparts in other states to form a united front to defend state policies against any challenge from the administration of President Trump.

The Los Angeles Democrat, who resigned Tuesday from Congress to become California’s top lawyer, was appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown to counter Trump proposals that are expected to include mass deportations, a roll-back of environmental laws and the dismantling of the national healthcare system that Californians have come to rely on.

“I don’t think California is looking to pick a fight, but we are ready for one,” Becerra told reporters Tuesday at his first news conference as attorney general.

One of Becerra’s first actions will be to arrange meetings with like-minded attorneys general in other states to “start charting a path together as a team on how we deal with representing our people.”

Becerra is supported by Democratic lawmakers as “the tip of the spear” for California in a coming legal battle with the federal government. Some observers see the state becoming the leading antagonist of the Trump administration in much the same way Republican elected officials in Texas were a leading counterforce to the administration of former President Obama.

At the same time, Becerra has been counseled by former top officials of the state attorney general’s office to avoid suing the federal government “early and often” because it could result in legal precedents that they say might hurt California for decades.

“Becerra will need to box, not brawl,” former state attorney general’s office advisors Michael Troncoso and Debbie Mesloh wrote in a recent op-ed piece published by The Times.

Becerra, 58, is the state’s first Latino attorney general and supports California policies that provide immigrants in the country illegally with driver’s licenses, college financial aid and legal services to appeal deportations.

He weighed in quickly Tuesday with concerns about a Trump administration proposal to deport criminals in the country illegally who could pose a threat to the community. While committed to removing dangerous people from California streets, Becerra worried that any eventual deportation orders may be too broad, unfairly catching in the net those with minor offenses who are otherwise productive members of society.

“Is someone who has a broken tail light a criminal?” he asked. “I hope that’s not the definition that the administration in Washington, D.C., will use.”

Becerra was given the oath of office at the Capitol by Brown, who said that he “will be a champion for all Californians.” The ceremony was held before Brown delivered his annual State of the State address, and a day after Becerra received final confirmation by the state Senate.

Becerra was accompanied at the ceremony by his wife, physician Carolina Reyes, two of his three daughters, and his parents, both immigrants from Mexico.

Brown noted his appointee’s background during his speech.

“Like so many others, he is the son of immigrants who saw California as a place where, through grit and determination, they could realize their dreams,” Brown said.

Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, congratulated Becerra for making history as the first Latino in the post, and predicted he “will set the gold standard for defending the values of the Golden State and fighting for the rights of Latinos and all Californians.”

Asked what it means to have a Latino become attorney general, Becerra said “It’s about time.”

Updates from Sacramento »

Brown appointed Becerra to fill a vacancy created when former state Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris won election to a seat in the U.S. Senate.

Becerra, who did not attend the Trump inauguration, said he would take direction from Brown’s speech Tuesday.

“You heard the governor,” Becerra said later to reporters. “He laid out a game plan that’s forward leaning. It’s clear that we’re going to move forward and we’re not stopping.”

The new attorney general said he planned to meet with staff at the state Department of Justice on Tuesday. He said he also looks forward to working together with former U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder, whose law firm was hired by the California Legislature to provide advice in dealing with potential threats from the federal government over conflicting policies.

“The more we prove that we are ready to take on any battle, the better off we will be,” Becerra said.

Becerra met with some county sheriffs on Monday, but plans to meet with more of them next week to talk about law enforcement issues facing the state. His first meetings with residents, civic leaders and others in coming weeks will be in the state’s Central Valley, he said.

“Some people think that California revolves around Los Angeles, San Francisco, sometimes Sacramento. There are a whole bunch of phenomenal Californians who often feel neglected,” Becerra said of people who live in the central part of the state.

The initial focus on local law enforcement in the Central Valley was welcomed by Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood, president of the California State Sheriffs’ Assn.

“He wants to start with law enforcement in the San Joaquin Valley, and I think that’s a really positive step,” Youngblood said. “I’m impressed with his credentials. I’m impressed with his background, and I think he’s going to be a good attorney general.”

Becerra will fill out the last two years of Harris’ term before the next election. He said he plans to run to keep the post in the 2018 election.

“I will officially open an account and do everything it takes to be a candidate for this office,” he said. “I hope that I can prove to the people of this state that I will be able to earn their support to be reelected.”

After 12 terms in Congress, Becerra’s appointment represents a homecoming, he told reporters.

“It’s nice to be here in Sacramento, where I grew up,” he said. “It’s nice to be in California. It’s nice not to have to do red-eye flights. It’s great to be home.”

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

Twitter: @mcgreevy99

ALSO

Assembly panel recommends Becerra for state attorney general after he promises to protect California against ‘federal intrusion’

Xavier Becerra is officially California’s new attorney general. Here are all the people running to replace him in Congress

Updates from Sacramento

What comes next is a mystery, but I’d like to share a note of appreciation as 2025 fades into history.

If you came to Greater Los Angeles from Mexico, by way of Calexico, Feliz Navidad.

If you once lived in Syria, and settled in Hesperia, welcome.

If you were born in what once was Bombay, but raised a family in L.A., happy new year.

I’m spreading a bit of holiday cheer because for immigrants, on the whole, this has been a horrible year.

Under federal orders in 2025, Los Angeles and other cities have been invaded and workplaces raided.

Immigrants have been chased, protesters maced.

Livelihoods have been aborted, loved ones deported.

With all the put-downs and name-calling by the man at the top, you’d never guess his mother was an immigrant and his three wives have included two immigrants.

President Trump referred to Somalis as garbage, and he wondered why the U.S. can’t bring in more people from Scandinavia and fewer from “filthy, dirty and disgusting” countries.

Not to be outdone, Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem proposed a travel ban on countries that are “flooding our nation with killers, leeches and entitlement junkies.”

The president’s shtick is to rail mostly against those who are in the country without legal standing and particularly those with criminal records. But his tone and language don’t always make such distinctions.

The point is to divide, lay blame and raise suspicion, which is why legal residents — including Pasadena Mayor Victor Gordo — have told me they carry their passports at all times.

In fact, thousands of people with legal status have been booted out of the country, and millions more are at risk of the same fate.

In a more evolved political culture, it would be simpler to stipulate that there are costs and benefits to immigration, that it’s human nature to flee hardship in pursuit of better opportunities wherever they might be, and that it’s possible to enact laws that serve the needs of immigrants and the industries that rely on them.

But 2025 was the year in which the nation was led in another direction, and it was the year in which it became ever more comforting and even liberating to call California home.

The state is a deeply flawed enterprise, with its staggering gaps in wealth and income, its homelessness catastrophe, housing affordability crisis and racial divides. And California is not politically monolithic, no matter how blue. It’s got millions of Trump supporters, many of whom applauded the roundups.

But there’s an understanding, even in largely conservative regions, that immigrants with papers and without are a crucial part of the muscle and brainpower that help drive the world’s fourth-largest economy.

That’s why some of the state’s Republican lawmakers asked Trump to back off when he first sent masked posses on roundups, stifling the construction, agriculture and hospitality sectors of the economy.

When the raids began, I called a gardener I had written about years ago after he was shot in the chest during a robbery attempt. He had insisted on leaving the hospital emergency room and going back to work immediately, with the bullet still embedded in his chest. A client had hired him to complete a landscaping job by Christmas, as a present to his wife, and the gardener was determined to deliver.

When I checked in with the gardener in June, he told me he was lying low because even though he has a work permit, he didn’t feel safe because Trump had vowed to end temporary protected status for some immigrants.

“People look Latino, and they get arrested,” he told me.

He said his daughter, whom I’d met two decades ago when I delivered $2,000 donated to the family by readers, was going to demonstrate in his name. I met up with her at the “No Kings” rally in El Segundo, where she told me why she wanted to protest:

“To show my face for those who can’t speak and to say we’re not all criminals, we’re all sticking together, we have each other’s backs,” she said.

Mass deportations would rip a $275-million hole in the state’s economy, critically affecting agriculture and healthcare among other industries, according to a report from UC Merced and the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

“Deportations tend to raise unemployment among U.S.-born and documented workers through reduced consumption and disruptions in complementary occupations,” says a UCLA Anderson report.

Californians understand these realities because they’re not hypothetical or theoretical — they’re a part of daily life and commerce. Nearly three-quarters of the state’s residents believe that immigrants benefit California “because of their hard work and job skills,” says the Public Policy Institute of California.

I’m a California native whose grandparents were from Spain and Italy, but the state has changed dramatically in my lifetime, and I don’t think I ever really saw it clearly or understood it until I was asked in 2009 to address the freshman convocation at Cal State Northridge. The demographics were similar to today’s — more than half Latino, 1 in 5 white, 10% Asian and 5% Black. And roughly two-thirds were first-generation college students.

I looked out on thousands of young people about to find their way and make their mark, and the students were flanked by a sprinkling of proud parents and grandparents, many of whose stories of sacrifice and yearning began in other countries.

That is part of the lifeblood of the state’s culture, cuisine, commerce and sense of possibility, and those students are now our teachers, nurses, physicians, engineers, entrepreneurs and tech whizzes.

If you left Taipei and settled in Monterey, said goodbye to Dubai and packed up for Ojai, traded Havana for Fontana or Morelia for Visalia, thank you.

And happy new year.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Reporting from Sacramento — Gov. Gavin Newsom’s lifelong struggle with dyslexia makes his proposal to screen little kids for developmental disorders a personal mission.

California’s new governor wasn’t diagnosed with the reading disability until he was in the fifth grade.

“I got screened late,” Newsom, 51, told me. “I bounced around to five schools in seven years because I didn’t get the support. My mom kept trying different schools, looking for support. Back then, they didn’t know what this stuff was.

“I’d fallen behind, literally behind, and when that happens you tend to act accordingly. Finally someone diagnosed it. That allowed me to get support and self-confidence.”

Whatever guidance young Newsom got obviously worked. He graduated from Santa Clara University, created a successful wine and hospitality business, was twice elected San Francisco mayor, became lieutenant governor and then California’s 40^th governor.

Anyone who watched Newsom’s recent inaugural speech on the Capitol steps saw him reading flawlessly off the teleprompter. He didn’t miss a beat even when his 2-year-old son, Dutch, leaped into his arms and stayed there.

In his $209-billion state budget proposal, Newsom asked the Legislature for roughly $100 million to fund developmental and health screenings for infants and toddlers in low-income families.

That’s a little-noticed slice of Newsom’s $1.8-billion proposed package of programs aimed at expanding early education and childcare for the poor.

More from George Skelton »

I asked the governor if the developmental screenings were inspired by his struggles with dyslexia.

“Deeply so — 100%,” he replied. “It’s very personal for me.

“If you get those screens early, you can not only change a person’s life, you can save taxpayers a lot in the process.”

That’s because certain developmental disorders can lead to serious medical ailments that often require tax dollars to treat. At worst, they can lead to criminal behavior.

“I found out [about dyslexia] when I was in the fifth grade,” Newsom says. “My mother struggled with whether to tell me about it. She didn’t want me to have an excuse. She wanted me to work hard.”

Newsom says at least one — maybe two — of his four children has dyslexia.

“It is deeply painful not just for the kids, but for the parents watching them struggle,” he says.

“Unless you get the screening, the rest of your life you struggle.” But with trained help, a child can work around the disorder, he adds, and “later in life you find other strengths.”

The biggest chunk of Newsom’s package to help kids from poor families — and their parents — is his proposal to offer all-day kindergarten. Now, 22% of school districts provide only part-day kindergarten, a costly burden on working parents who must pay for expensive childcare after school.

Newsom also wants to provide full-day pre-kindergarten for all 4-year-olds from low-income families. He’d like to eventually include 3-year-olds.

Coverage of California politics »

“Most of the brain development work is done by the time you’re 4,” the governor says. “Getting 3-year-olds in [class] is the game-changer.”

OK, that’s a great idea. But why not provide pre-kindergarten classes for all kids, regardless of family income? The middle class gets shunted aside again.

There’s a reason why Social Security and Medicare — and K-12 public schools — are so popular everywhere. They’re not means tested. No one is rejected because of income.

Newsom asked the Legislature for $10 million to draw “a road map” to universal pre-kindergarten for every 3- and 4-year-old, regardless of family income. But liberal lawmakers would need to be persuaded to provide preschool for the upper middle class and wealthy.

“The consensus in the Legislature is that it’s not our goal to serve kids whose parents have the means to afford their own,” Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Paramount) told me last month.

But full-time day care is unaffordable for many middle-class parents. It costs as much or more than tuition at the University of California — $1,000 a month and up.

The governor and legislators say there isn’t enough money for universal pre-kindergarten, not even with a projected budget surplus of around $21 billion.

“And even if we had all the resources in the world,” Newsom says, “we’re not prepared to spend that appropriately. We couldn’t even lease the facilities, couldn’t train the workforce. It’s not just about access. It’s about quality access.”

Assemblyman Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento), who chairs the budget subcommittee on education finance, says it would cost $4 billion annually to include all 4-year-olds in pre-kindergarten. He has introduced legislation to cover poor children. He estimates that would cost $1.5 billion.

“I’d like nothing more than to afford it for all kids,” McCarty says. “But we have other priorities. We can start with the families who need it the most — where we get the biggest bang for the buck.

“Upper-middle-class families will pay for it on their own. And some of the middle-class families will just miss out.”

Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Holly J. Mitchell (D-Los Angeles), who once ran one of the largest child development organizations in the country, Crystal Stairs, says, “If I had a magic wand, I absolutely would” provide early childhood education for everyone. “But we don’t even have enough money to pay for the lowest-income kids.”

Somehow they’ll find enough money for the poor kids and should — and make sure they’re screened for developmental disorders.

Famous people, including Steven Spielberg, Walt Disney, Leonardo da Vinci, Tom Cruise and Albert Einstein, have battled dyslexia.

California’s governor is the latest role model for youngsters struggling with the affliction.

george.skelton@latimes.com

Follow @LATimesSkelton on Twitter

Henry Gabriel Cisneros walks briskly across a 200-acre lot that was once a wooded area infested with rattlesnakes and a few aspiring arsonists. On this blustery afternoon in San Antonio, the wind howls across the freshly razed plain as he heads for a large white tent. Time has not softened his unmistakable oval face and elongated nose. But, at 54, his skin has taken on an ashy hue, and a new wave of gray strands has made its debut in his thinning black hair–helped along, no doubt, by federal prosecutors and the FBI.

Inside the tent, 300 real estate agents stand around buffet tables, primed to see Cisneros. They want to hear how American City Vista, Cisneros’ new low-income housing development company, intends to save this section of south San Antonio.

It’s an exciting project, yet it doesn’t account for the anticipation buzzing through this crowd. No, for that you’ve got to look to Cisneros himself, to the man who rose to national prominence as the mayor of this city and who has returned to Texas after nine years in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. The locals are eager to lay eyes again on the hometown boy who has come back to his roots.

Cisneros ducks into the tent and takes the microphone. He explains that the 600 homes in this new development will be shaded by maple trees, bordered by jogging paths and wired with high-speed Internet lines. “We’ll fix it here in south San Antonio, and we’ll make it right,” he says, sounding an awful lot like a man launching a campaign. He finishes to a standing ovation. Smiles all around. Henry Cisneros, it seems, is back.

Or is he?

When Cisneros returned to San Antonio last year, leaving his lucrative job as chief operating officer at Univision, the country’s largest Spanish-language television network, Democrats around the country salivated at the prospect of his returning to political life. Cisneros, they thought, had finally overcome the “other woman” scandal whose seeds–planted when he was San Antonio mayor–sprouted ignominiously in Washington when Cisneros accepted a Clinton administration Cabinet post in 1992. FBI agents conducting a background check after his nomination had asked Cisneros how much financial support he was providing to her. He lied. From there, the investigation grew, and Cisneros left the capital after one term.

That was four years ago–eons on the political calendar. American politics today requires complete shamelessness. Elected officials breezily put their mistakes behind them and move ahead.

But not Cisneros, and that’s the point. In 2001, Cisneros is the man who would not be king. He says he returned to San Antonio not as a Democrat running for office, but because he liked the security of his hometown, a city where Latinos still hang portraits of him in their living rooms, where he is known simply as Henry. He also says he returned because his ailing parents drew him back, and he mentions the death of his father-in-law last year.

But Cisneros came home to heal. He remains hunkered down, a Roman Catholic trying to forgive himself for behavior he believes has wrought permanent damage on his family, and others. Cisneros isn’t now–and maybe never will be–ready to put himself or his family through the public strip search required of a national candidate.

*

WE ARE SITTING IN THE SUNNY CONFERENCE ROOM OF AMERICAN CITY Vista, an office that occupies one floor of a three-story brick building in downtown San Antonio. Cisneros, dressed in a starched white shirt and dark suit pants, crosses his lanky legs at the ankles. They move like grasshopper limbs.

We have spoken at length about his past and politics, and the conversation has turned to Bill Clinton–his friend and former boss. Cisneros volunteers a story from the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had just “won a round of some kind” against Clinton in his 1998 investigation into the president’s affair with the White House intern. Cisneros was working in Los Angeles at the time, and he watched on television as Clinton reacted publicly to Starr’s findings. “I didn’t think the president’s response to the press was as humble as it ought to be–as self-effacing as it ought to be,” Cisneros recalls. He thought he should offer some advice, to tell Clinton “that he should just chill a bit and not be so in-your-face.” He wanted to remind Clinton to take a moment to regroup.

That night, the White House operator connected him to Clinton. “He was on the line,” Cisneros says, “and I was about to utter my words, and he said ‘HENRY!’ ” Cisneros booms, imitating Clinton. “ ‘I think we got this son of a bitch where we want him! Don’t you?’ ” Cisneros didn’t think so. In fact, he was “blown away” by Clinton’s moxie.

Cisneros tells the tale with great delight, as if there is nothing wrong with revealing such intimacies about his friend. And there isn’t, because the story isn’t really about the former president. It’s about Cisneros, and the absence of his own combative spirit. It’s a glaring absence.

Bill Richardson, who served as U.N. ambassador and then energy secretary under Clinton, says of his good friend Cisneros: “If I have one criticism of Henry, it’s that he is cautious. His destiny is to become the first Latino governor or possibly president, and I believe that his caution is the only reservation for that achievement. He needs to assume that he is back on track for a subsequent political career–for an Act II. And I believe he is.”

Former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, who lost her seat to George W. Bush in 1994, drove the issue home at an event last winter. “When they write your obituary, you don’t want the top positions to be mayor of San Antonio and secretary of housing,” Cisneros recalls her saying.

Cisneros was once a precocious man of formidable potential. His political career started in 1975 at age 27, when he became the youngest city councilman in San Antonio history. Six years later, he made his first run at the mayor’s office. In speeches to white crowds, he ticked off his degrees from Harvard and George Washington University, promising to lure business to San Antonio. In speeches to Latinos on the city’s west side, he promised to send his wealthy opponent “back to the country club.”

It was 1981, and Cisneros won 63% of the vote to become the first Latino mayor of a large U.S. city. In 1984, Walter Mondale interviewed him as a possible vice presidential running mate. Cisneros was reelected mayor three times.

“It was extraordinary to those of us who followed politics,” says Jim Oberwetter, who ran George Bush senior’s 1992 presidential reelection campaign in Texas. “He had achieved greatly within the Republican community.” Polls showed Cisneros had made significant inroads elsewhere in Texas, even in Republican strongholds. That meant he possessed a rare quality–the magic of a national candidate.

“He had all the attributes needed to appeal to Dallas Republicans–he had a list of accomplishments to point to from being mayor,” Oberwetter continues. “He was a good family man, which appeals to the Republicans.”

In reality, Cisneros’ marriage to his high school sweetheart, Mary Alice, was threadbare. As mayor and an assistant professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio, he clocked 16-hour days. The elected post paid only $60 a week, and the teaching job couldn’t support his family. Cisneros traveled anywhere in the country where speaking fees were offered. Friends say the opportunities for relationships outside his marriage were plentiful. His charisma inspired a line of men’s toiletries, “Henry C,” that rolled out in 1986.

In 1987 he fell for Linda Medlar, a political fund-raiser who was also married. Mary Alice was pregnant with the Cisneroses’ third child. On June 10, 1987, doctors delivered a boy, whom they named John Paul in honor of the pope’s visit to San Antonio. The elated young mayor went out to talk to reporters, but when he walked back into the hospital, he learned that the chances of his son living past childhood were slim.

Doctors believed John Paul’s body would quickly outgrow his heart’s ability to bring him oxygen. By age 6, they said, his lips would turn blue often, and he wouldn’t be able to keep up with the other kids. The tips of his fingers would become clubby, and some of his appendages would simply stop growing. By age 8, he would probably be dying.

“Part of the reason I could not do what other people might have done in that circumstance–get divorced, remarry–was this situation,” Cisneros says as we sit in his office. “I just couldn’t. I couldn’t let Mary Alice deal with that by herself.”

But 16 months later, on Oct. 14, 1988, his hand was forced when thousands of readers of the San Antonio-Express News awoke to a front-page column about the affair. In response, Cisneros told reporters gathered on his front lawn: “I guess human beings just aren’t made of plastic and wiring and metal. They’re made of flesh and blood and feelings.”

He said he would serve out the remainder of his term but would not run for reelection. Cisneros left his devoutly Roman Catholic wife and, according to court documents, he lived periodically with Medlar, who reclaimed her maiden name of Jones after her husband filed for divorce.

But by the time Mary Alice filed divorce papers in late 1991, claiming acts of cruelty and adultery, Cisneros was determined to reconcile. He would not fail at marriage. The high school sweethearts got back together. Jones was quickly ostracized by the community, but Cisneros privately agreed to continue sending her financial support, to assuage his own conscience as much as anything. He had no idea that in 1990, she had begun taping–and editing–their phone calls. It’s unclear if she wanted the tapes as insurance that he would continue the payments, or if she planned all along to make them public.

In 1992 Cisneros worked on “Adelante Con Clinton,” a Latino voter outreach project that helped propel Clinton to office. When Clinton asked him to become secretary of housing, Cisneros feared his financial agreement with Jones would be exposed, so he alerted the president-elect to the arrangement. Then he did something that altered his political career–he lied to the FBI agents. For reasons that he still doesn’t explain, Cisneros told investigators he paid her less than $10,000 a year. And then he cut off communication with her.

In July 1994, she sued him for reneging on a deal to send her $4,000 a month. She also sold the tapes of the phone conversations to the syndicated television show “Inside Edition” for $15,000. Naively, she thought that investigators would only look at Cisneros. Instead, they also followed the money trail into her own investments.

During the next few years, authorities unearthed lies on her home mortgage application, in which Jones relied on money and signatures from her sister and brother-in-law to close the deal. She was convicted of money laundering, bank fraud and making false statements. Initially sentenced to 42 months, her lawyer got it trimmed to 18 months in federal prison.

David Guinn Jr., a former assistant federal public defender who represented her, says Jones now lives with her mother in Lubbock, Texas, and they depend on a stipend from her siblings. Cisneros no longer sends her money. She fights chronic depression, Guinn says, and did not want to comment for this article.

For Cisneros, the FBI investigation had ripped back the curtain on the confession booth. His San Antonio indiscretion had now been revisited, this time as the subject of a full-blown federal investigation. By 1995, Cisneros was inundated with bills that would eventually total $4 million. He owed tuition for one daughter at law school and another at college. John Paul, whose heart was repaired by a Philadelphia surgeon, still incurred significant medical costs.

Financially, Cisneros needed out of Washington. “The president would have been perfectly happy to have him stay,” says former White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta. “But Henry felt he really did need to deal with [the investigation] and try to resolve it so it wouldn’t destroy him.”

In January 1997, at nearly 1:30 on the morning of Clinton’s second inauguration, Cisneros’ final act was to help Clinton rehearse his inaugural address. At noon he and Mary Alice sat behind Clinton as he delivered it. The president then walked inside for the traditional inaugural lunch, and Cisneros and Mary Alice went to a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Not long after, they moved to Bel-Air Crest, a gated community in Los Angeles, and he assumed the title of chief operating officer at Univision, a Spanish-language network that reaches more than 80% of all Latino households in the country. His job at the network was to represent the face of Univision, to sell its brand, even though the network caters to recently arrived immigrants.

The network boomed while he was there. Soon Univision had the fifth-largest viewership of any U.S. television network, English or Spanish. The surge solved Cisneros’ financial woes. During his first year, he pulled down $400,000 in salary, not including bonuses and Univision stock options, from which he derives the majority of his personal wealth today. When Cisneros arrived at Univision, a share of its stock was valued at $18.50. On the day he left last year, it was $122. Cisneros traded in $10.8 million in company stock last year, and he still owns stock options worth more than $6 million.

By September 1999, Cisneros was a wealthy man with a court date. He appeared before a U.S. district judge in Washington and pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of lying to the FBI. He was fined $10,000.

For all his financial success at Univision, Cisneros seemed miscast as a television executive. Sometimes the clash was painful to behold. At the last Univision annual meeting he attended, advertisers sat in gilded chairs at round tables. Up on the enormous stage, Cisneros stood with the network’s stars, including Alicia Machado, a former Miss Venezuela. Just for good measure, Spanish mega-crooner Julio Iglesias was up there, too, looking tanned and rested. There wasn’t a wonk in sight, except Cisneros– the former politician rented out to a media corporation so he could pay legal bills stemming from an affair 13 years earlier.

*

MARY ALICE CISNEROS IS IMMACULATELY GROOMED AT A BIRDLIKE 5-foot-2 and 100 pounds, with black hair and small pieces of gold and diamond jewelry on her wrists and fingers. When she recalls a conversation she’s had with her husband of 32 years, she cranes her neck, looks up to his imaginary face and pretends she’s speaking to him. But when they’re together, he consistently cuts her off in mid-sentence if she begins to speak about anything other than their family.

She has considered herself a public figure in San Antonio since childhood, when she and her eight siblings worked at her father’s bakery and grocery store. In front of their house on West Houston Street, she points out her relatives’ homes that are within shouting distance. “I liked L.A.–all the glamour and the art–but this is home.”

Henry’s family is close by, as well. His uncle Ruben Mungu’a, 81, runs the print shop that created all of Cisneros’ mayoral propaganda. As a “good way” to recover from open-heart surgery he had last November, Mungu’a showed up at the shop for a five-day workweek in early February. He is feisty and optimistic–convinced that his nephew should run for the U.S. Senate in several years.

“Now’s not the time. He’s got to pay his bills. He’s got to work a new generation of voters who don’t know him, since he’s been away. He’s got to build up a new image,” Mungu’a says. Then he broaches the subject of politicians and peccadilloes. “Little Baby Jesus–that’s Lyndon B. Johnson–had his own affairs, and, of course, he came in to replace JFK. Eisenhower was also accused of doing certain things when it was cold in Europe. Finally, little Billy comes along. The people have all forgotten this. So, Henry’s thing is not going to pull support from him. That period of his life is totally resolved.”

But Cisneros knows better. Unlike so many politicians who seek redemption and live off the energy of a new political race, Cisneros can feel the Republicans ready to whack him, and it makes him cringe. Susan Weddington, chair of the Texas Republican Party, would have no qualms about taking the first swing. “His potential to be resuscitated as a candidate would require complete memory loss of the electorate. His indiscretion was embarrassing to Texans, especially to Hispanic Texas. I believe that kind of memory loss is highly unlikely.”

It is partisan talk, but it is exactly this kind of contact sport that Cisneros says he’s not willing to play–at least not now. Instead, he wants order and discipline. He doesn’t smoke, and he rarely drinks even a glass of wine with dinner. In his wallet he carries two neatly typed lists, one of nonfiction books and one of the great novels. “I keep a list because when I go to the bookstore I know what to buy,” he says. “I’m trying to read important books that give a person depth.”

When Cisneros grudgingly agrees to talk about the possibility of his running for office, he takes his time. He uncrosses his legs, tilts his head and runs his fingers along the edge of the conference table. Then, in measured statements, he talks about his aversion to both the campaign and the possible bad consequences. It’s clear. He no longer views the political game as he once did.

Mark McKinnon, a media consultant who took on his first Republican client last year when George W. Bush asked him to be his media director, describes Cisneros as someone who is “as smooth and deft and agile as anyone who’s ever been in this business.”

“And there’s an enormous redemptive well open to him, whenever he wants to tap into it,” McKin-non says. “I think he’s much harder on himself than anyone else.”

In Cisneros, Democrats see a handsome, vigorous Latino with national name recognition and a limitless future. Democrats have pushed him to run for the U.S. Senate in 2002, or for Texas governor, a post held until this year by Bush. Instead, Cisneros remains in a cramped fetal position, and while he does, his party is struggling, especially in Texas. Terry McAuliffe, a political fund-raiser and head of the Democratic National Committee, appealed to Cisneros last August at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. “Texas is a big seat for us,” McAuliffe says. “Winning that governorship for us is critical, more than ever. When you really want to win, you get a big player, and Henry’s as big as you get.”

Less than 20 years ago, every statewide seat in Texas belonged to a Democrat. Republicans now hold all the statewide titles in Texas. That includes, for example, every spot on the Supreme Court, the court of criminal appeals, and on down to the railroad commission. More important, it also means that both U.S. senators and the governor are Republicans.

With Cisneros out, things look daunting for the party of inclusion in a large, increasingly Latino state. This winter, Democrats began circling the wagons for A.R. “Tony” Sanchez Jr., a Latino oil magnate who has never held public office. Although a Democrat, he pulled in more than $100,000 in hard money for Bush last year because he believed in the governor.

None of this is to say, however, that Cisneros doesn’t still enjoy the parlor game of politics. He keeps the public intrigued by denying he’s running, while refusing to say if he ever will. He jokes that the door is closed, but not locked. He also dips a helping hand into select races. Last year, for instance, he and L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina met secretly with L.A.’s two Latino mayoral candidates in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade one of them to drop out. (“I know it’s popular to say that that’s an older paradigm of ethnic politics, and that it shouldn’t be that way,” he acknowledges of the message he and Molina carried.)

Cisneros also campaigned for former Vice President Al Gore, kicking off “Rally in the Valley” in the Rio Grande Valley, and he raised funds for the San Antonio mayoral campaign of Ed Garza, a 32-year-old city councilman who won last month. But that’s as far as he goes. Instead of political life, he’s thrown himself into American City Vista, a hybrid of politics and commerce intended to revitalize neighborhoods. It’s known as “infill,” where large clusters of Craftsmen and Victorian homes are built on swaths of abandoned or blighted city land.

His first project is Lago Vista. American City Vista is also overseeing similar developments in Southern California, both in the northeast San Fernando Valley.

In April, on Good Friday, we meet at the impressive Sylmar development, which is ringed by mountains and sits next to the Angeles National Forest. It’s unseasonably hot on this afternoon, and hang gliders float silently above us. We are in a car, with Mary Alice in the back seat talking to their daughter by cell phone about a recipe for Easter dinner. Cisneros tells me it will be difficult for anyone to make Jell-O mold like Mary Alice does.

The homes he has invested in here are larger and more indulgent than the Lago Vista homes in south San Antonio. Cisneros spreads his arms and asks: “Where else in L.A. could you get a 2,138-square-foot home for $260,000 with this view?”

*

IF THERE IS ANY EVIDENCE THAT Cisneros can’t seem to get the legal glop of this past decade off of his hands, one only needs to look at the events of this year’s inaugural weekend.

Among the dozens of people Clinton pardoned on his final day in office were Cisneros and Jones. Cisneros learned about the pardon the day before, when his attorney reached him moments before he was about to deliver a speech to 1,000 people in Silicon Valley. The attorney said the White House had called to see if it was “OK” to put him on the pardon list.

“I heard nothing more until noon the next day. We started getting telephone calls from the press that I was on the list,” Cisneros says, explaining that he had been meeting with Tony Sanchez in Laredo when the news broke. The next week, he spoke with Clinton by phone about the surprise pardon.

“He just felt the independent counsel statute had been abused and that, as much as possible, the wrongs created by it needed to be wiped away. He has always felt that the greatest reason they came after me was to get to him,” Cisneros says. “I don’t think that’s completely true. I think I made mistakes and gave them reason to come after me, but he has felt that way.”

In the weeks that followed, the list of recipients became an example of what many people dislike most about Clinton–the bending of laws to suit his own needs. The shakiest pardons were for Marc Rich, a fugitive financier whose wife donated significant sums of money to the Clinton library and the Democratic Party, and for Carlos Vignali, whose father donated heavily to California Democrats. For Cisneros, the association with this latest political scandal was bruising.

“It just reopened old wounds and raised questions with people about the seriousness of the offenses and why they needed to be included in a pardon list,” he says.

Asked if he’s forgiven himself for the pain he caused, Cisneros looks out the window.

“I suppose not.”

It gnaws at him, though–the fear that he will never get out from under his own issues and run for office again.

As time goes on, it will become increasingly difficult for him to justify staying away so long, and if he forgets that fact, Ann Richards and others will remind him. “There are a lot of other things I’d like to do and, hopefully, by the time it’s time to write an obituary, they’ll be other accomplishments under my belt, not necessarily related to holding office, because I think there are many, many ways to contribute substantially in our society, even more than holding office for 6 to 12 years,” he says. His words are emphatic, but his tone isn’t entirely convincing.

“There’s a lot of water under the bridge for me,” he says slowly. “And some of these things I have to sort out for myself.”

A federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its Justice Department counterpart from “sweeping” civil arrests at immigration courthouses across Northern California, teeing up an appellate challenge to one of the Trump administration’s most controversial deportation tactics.

“This circumstance presents noncitizens in removal proceedings with a Hobson’s choice between two irreparable harms,” Judge P. Casey Pitts wrote in his Christmas Eve decision.

“First, they may appear in immigration court and face likely arrest and detention,” the judge wrote. “Alternatively, noncitizens may choose not to appear and instead to forego their opportunity to pursue their claims for asylum or other relief from removal.”

Wednesday’s decision blocks ICE and the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review from lying in wait for asylum seekers and other noncitizens at routine hearings throughout the region — a move that would effectively restore pre-Trump prohibition on such arrests.

“Here, ICE and EOIR’s prior policies governing courthouse arrests and detention in holding facilities provide a standard,” the judge said.

Authorities have long curbed arrests at “sensitive locations”— such as hospitals, houses of worship and schools — putting them out of reach of most civil immigration enforcement.

The designation was first established decades ago under ICE’s predecessor agency, Immigration and Naturalization Services. ICE absorbed the prohibitions when the agency was formed in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Courts were added to the list under President Obama. The policy prohibiting most courthouse arrests was suspended during the first Trump administration and reinstated by President Biden.

Internal ICE guidance from the Biden era found “[e]xecuting civil immigration enforcement actions in or near a courthouse may chill individuals’ access to courthouses and, as a result, impair the fair administration of justice.”

Nevertheless, the agency’s courthouse policy was reversed again earlier this year, leading to a surge in arrests, and a staggering drop in court appearances, court records show.

Most who do not show up are ordered removed in absentia.

Monthly removal in absentia orders more than doubled this year, to 4,177 from fewer than 1,600 in 2024, justice department data show.

More than 50,000 asylum seekers have been ordered removed after failing to appear in court hearings since January — more than were ordered removed in absentia in the previous five years combined.

“ICE cannot choose to ignore the ‘costs’ of its new policies—chilling the participation of noncitizens in their removal proceedings —and consider only the policies’ purported ‘benefits’ for immigration enforcement,” Pitts wrote in his stay order.

That ruling likely sets the San Francisco case on a collision course with other lawsuits seeking to curb ICE’s incursions into spaces previously considered off-limits. This suit was brought by a group of asylum seekers who braved the risk and were detained when they showed up to court.

One, a 24-year-old Guatemalan asylum seeker named Yulisa Alvarado Ambrocio, was spared detention only because her breastfeeding 11-month-old was with her in court, records show. Administration lawyers told the court ICE would almost certainly pick her up at her next hearing.

Such arrests appear arbitrary and capricious, and are unlikely to survive scrutiny by the courts, Judge Pitts ruled Wednesday.

“That widespread civil arrests at immigration courts could have a chilling effect on noncitizens’ attendance at removal proceedings (as common sense, the prior guidance, and the actual experience in immigration court since May 2025 make clear) and thereby undermine this central purpose is thus ‘an important aspect of the problem’ that ICE was required, but failed, to consider,” Pitts wrote.

A district judge in Manhattan ruled the opposite way on a similar case this fall, setting up a possible circuit split and even a Supreme Court challenge to courthouse arrests in 2026.

For now, the Christmas Eve decision only applies to ICE’s San Francisco Area of Responsibility, a region encompassing all of Northern and Central California, as far south as Bakersfield.

The geographic limit comes in response to the Supreme Court’s emergency decision earlier this year stripping district judges of the power to block federal policies outside narrowly-tailored circumstances.

The administration told the court it intends to appeal to the 9th Circuit, where Trump-appointed judges have swung the bench far to the right of its longtime liberal reputation.

WASHINGTON — The national Republican Party leadership, spurred by chairman Lee Atwater, today cut all ties to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, the newly elected Louisiana Republican state lawmaker.

Party spokeswoman Leslie Goodman said 28 voting members of the party’s executive committee unanimously repudiated during a telephone vote Duke’s racist and anti-Semitic views and barred financial or other assistance for him.

Duke, 38, a former klan grand wizard, was elected to the Legislature Saturday from a suburban New Orleans district in a narrow victory over builder John Treen, 63, who was backed by President Bush and former President Ronald Reagan.

The resolution adopted by the national Republicans in effect “excommunicates” Duke, according to Atwater, who said Duke is neither a Republican nor a Democrat but “a charlatan and a faker” using Republicans to promote his racist agenda.