The congressman from the 46th District is Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican first elected in 1988. He calls himself a surfer Republican and sports an American-flag surfboard on his lapel. He grew up in Southern California, went to college and experimented with drugs, and once had a folk band called the Goldwaters. By the mid-70s, he was on a straighter path as a press aide in Ronald Reagan’s 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns. He wrote editorials for the Orange County Register and later was a speechwriter in the Reagan White House. He returned to Southern California in 1988, when Long Beach-based GOP Rep. Dan Lungren was appointed acting state treasurer. With fundraising help from Oliver North, the Reagan White House aide–cum–Iran-Contra-scandal protagonist, Rohrabacher won the primary with 35% of the vote and went on to win the general election easily, with 64% of the vote. In 2004, Rohrabacher, then 56, and his wife, Rhonda, became the parents of triplets.

A self-styled free spirit, Rohrabacher likes to make waves in the House. His website once featured the motto: “Fighting for freedom and having fun.” His voting record can be unpredictable, especially on cultural issues. He supported the use of medical marijuana and federal funding for embryonic-stem-cell research.

That helps to explain why this maverick has found himself on second-level committees. But he has made the most of his opportunities. As chairman of the Science Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, he worked for the single-stage-to-orbit vehicle. In 2004, President George W. Bush signed his bill to promote the development of the commercial human spaceflight industry. He has supported an obscure NASA program to search for and knock off course asteroids and comets that could slam into Earth. As much as he seems to love science, Rohrabacher has toed the party line on the issue of climate change, which he calls “nonsense” that jeopardizes the nation’s freedom and prosperity. In 2007, he lost to the more senior Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas, for the ranking minority position on the full Science and Technology Committee.

Rohrabacher’s other main focus has been the Foreign Affairs Committee. Soon after the September 11 attacks, he visited the exiled king of Afghanistan in Rome, encouraged him to return to Kabul and promised that the United States would oust the Taliban and help rebuild Afghanistan. Rohrabacher has been a longtime critic of China’s rulers and strongly opposed normal trade relations with China and Vietnam. Despite the Bush administration’s criticism that it would violate the peace treaty, he won House passage of his amendment to allow World War II prisoners of war to sue Japanese companies for enslaving them.

In 2003, he delayed his support for the Republicans’ Medicare prescription-drug bill until Republican leaders, in exchange for his vote, gave him a vote on his bill to require hospitals to report potential illegal immigrants to the Homeland Security Department. He also has led voter initiatives to remove illegal aliens from California’s welfare and school rolls, and he successfully urged Bush to grant pardons to two former Border Patrol agents who shot a Mexican drug dealer.

Rohrabacher was routinely re-elected by wide margins. But in 2008, he faced his most competitive challenger: Huntington Beach Mayor Debbie Cook, a Democratic lawyer and environmental activist who claimed he had done little during his time in Congress. With no help from the national party, she raised $482,000. Rohrabacher criticized Cook’s opposition to more oil drilling and her support for the bailout of the financial markets, which he said rewarded “those who acted irresponsibly.” Rohrabacher won 53%-43%, leading comfortably in each of the two counties in the district.