Rep. Grace Napolitano (D)

The congresswoman from the 38th District is Grace Napolitano, a Democrat first elected in 1998. Napolitano grew up in the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, married at age 18, and eventually had five children. When she was 23, the family moved to California. She got a job as a secretary at Ford Motor and stayed for 22 years. After her first husband died, she married Frank Napolitano, and in 1980, they started a pizzeria. She served on the Norwalk City Council from 1986 to 1992, and also served one term as mayor, becoming the first Latino to hold the position. In 1992, she was elected to the California Assembly from a district that covered much of her current congressional district.

Term-limited in 1998, she got the opportunity to run for Congress when 16-year Democratic Rep. Esteban Torres announced three days before the filing deadline that he was retiring. Torres’s surprise move seemed designed to promote the election of Jamie Casso, his son-in-law and chief of staff, who immediately announced his candidacy. But Napolitano was not deterred. She persuaded the state AFL-CIO to vote an “open endorsement,” although the executive board had backed Casso and Torres had been a senior United Auto Workers official in the 1960s. Napolitano and Casso waged a fierce campaign. She criticized him for not living in the district, and he criticized her $180,000 loan to her campaign at an unusual 18% interest rate. Napolitano had the financial backing of national women’s organizations, including EMILY’s List, plus the benefit of higher name recognition. The two candidates had few differences on major issues. Napolitano signed a pledge to serve only three terms. She won the primary by 618 votes, and her victory in November was assured in this Democratic district.

In the House, Napolitano has a mostly liberal voting record. As chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in 2005, she urged changes in the Democratic Party’s outreach to Hispanic voters and was more consensus-oriented on immigration reform than some caucus members. On the Natural Resources Committee, Napolitano was active in the 2004 reauthorization of the California Bay-Delta water-allocation program, which featured unusual bipartisanship among Californians.

When Democrats took majority control in 2007, she became the chairman of the Natural Resources panel’s Water and Power Subcommittee, with a focus on Southern California’s acute need for an adequate water supply of good quality. In 2007, she co-founded the bipartisan Congressional Water Caucus to inform Congress of clean-water needs and to monitor the impact of global warming. She helped to enact a bill in 2008 to study more-efficient management of water resources and to cap the costs to consumers of guards at Bureau of Reclamation dams.

Napolitano is also involved in the needs of the mentally ill, an interest that was sparked by a report that one in three Hispanic girls contemplates suicide. “Mental health is treatable. But [the Latino community has] a stigma attached to it,” Napolitano said. “We don’t want to see it, we don’t want to hear it, we don’t want to feel it. We hide it.” She supports requiring insurers to treat mental health services the same as other medical services in coverage decisions.

Napolitano’s work has played well at home. She has not been seriously challenged for re-election and she continued the unusual practice of charging her campaign 18% for her personal loans. In February 2003, she abandoned her earlier pledge to serve only three terms; she ran for a fourth in 2004 and won. In 2007, she was criticized by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington for paying her daughter, Yolanda Dyer, and her daughter’s consulting firm nearly $53,000 for work on her campaigns between 2002 and 2006. Napolitano said her daughter ran her campaigns and probably should have been paid more for her work.

Local Hispanic leaders undoubtedly will have their eyes on the 38th during redistricting and will be nudging Napolitano, who will be in her mid-70s, to retire. Democrats ought to have no trouble retaining the seat.