Rep. John Doolittle (R) Elected 1990, 8th term
Born:	Oct. 30, 1950, Glendale
Home:	Rocklin
Education:	U. of CA at Santa Cruz, B.A. 1972, U. of the Pacific, J.D. 1978
Religion:	Mormon
Marital Status:	married (Julia)
Elected  Office:	CA Senate, 1980-90, Repub. Caucus Chmn., 1987-90.
Professional Career:	Practicing atty., 1978-80.
DC Office	2410 RHOB20515, 202-225-2511; Fax: 202-225-5444; Web site: www.house.gov/doolittle
State Offices	Granite Bay, 916-786-5560.
Additional Info
Committees · Ratings · Key Votes · Election Results District Demographics
More On California
At A Glance · State Profile District Map Redistricting · Almanac Home
Recent News Coverage
Search the CongressDaily, Hotline, House Race Hotline, National Journal and Technology Daily archives using the form below:
[an error occurred while processing this directive]

California sprang suddenly into existence: The Gold Rush of 1849 was followed by statehood and the creation of the first 27 counties in 1850. The new state's first boom area was the Mother Lode country in the foothills of the Sierras above Sacramento. Mining camps the size of eastern cities grew up in vacant valleys locked amid steep hills, with thousands of would-be millionaires gathered to find gold--though most of those who actually got rich did so by catering to miners' needs. In Placerville, John Studebaker had a buggy shop, Phillip Armour ran a butcher shop and Mark Hopkins had a dry goods store. The biggest mine in California was sunk in Grass Valley in 1857 and worked for half a century. But long before that, most of the Mother Lode country emptied out, leaving ghost towns and villages with hundreds of deserted houses: an antique vacation country left behind in time.

When local residents celebrated the sesquicentennial, the area had been resurrected as a booming exurban and tourist mecca. "The American River near Coloma becomes a virtual freeway of whooping rafters on summer weekends," reported USA Today. "The Mother Lode also offers modern-day prospectors an intriguing pastiche of bed-and-breakfast inns, musty antique stores and such blink-and-you'll-miss-'em outposts as Volcano, Fiddletown, Rough and Ready"--named after President Zachary Taylor. Thousands of Californians--many of them families from smog-filled, middle-class suburbs of the Los Angeles Basin and the San Francisco Bay area--looking for a more pleasant, small-town, orderly environment, have found it along fast-flowing creeks where the '49ers camped. For the past three decades, populations of these counties have risen sharply. Placer County, which includes Sacramento suburbs and part of the Mother Lode country, grew 78% from 1990 to 2004, more than any other county in California. It also has a higher percentage of registered Republicans than any other county. Politically, this growth has changed the Mother Lode country from Democratic to Republican. In 1976, nine Mother Lode counties from Sierra to Mariposa cast 118,000 votes and voted 50%-47% for Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford: close to the California average. In 2004 they cast 370,000 votes and voted 61% for George W. Bush--a percentage closer to Idaho's than California's. The culture here could not be much different than what prevails less than 50 miles away in the Bay Area.

The 4th Congressional District of California consists of the northern half of the Mother Lode country and the Placer County suburbs of Sacramento, plus a small slice of Sacramento County. It extends northward through thinly populated mountain counties to the Oregon line. Most of its residents live within the I-80 corridor, clustered near the Sacramento County line in suburban places like Roseville (the district's most populous city) and Rocklin, or in the Mother Lode country from Placerville to Nevada City. Some 33% of its people live in areas classified as rural, the largest percentage of the state's 53 districts.

The congressman from the 4th District is John Doolittle, a Republican first elected in 1990. Doolittle grew up in the Los Angeles area and went to high school in Cupertino, in what now is Silicon Valley. His conservatism was annealed in the fires of adversity: He graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1972, when the campus was 97% for George McGovern. After law school he moved to the edge of the Sacramento metro area where the foothills begin, and in 1980 was elected to the state Senate at 30. When the Republican incumbent retired in 1990 in a district that then stretched from the Mother Lode country to Stockton, Doolittle ran for the seat. He had tougher competition than expected from Democrat Patricia Malberg, who was pro-choice on abortion, against nuclear power and for defense spending cuts; he won by just 50%-46%.

As a freshman, Doolittle was one of the Republicans' Gang of Seven, who were the advance guard for Newt Gingrich's 1994 revolution. In the Republican House, Doolittle chaired a subcommittee the Democrats who represented this area would have relished: Water and Power. But his agenda resembled theirs only in his support for the Auburn Dam, which he and other Sacramento area congressmen for decades have wanted to build on the American River, 35 miles east of Sacramento. Doolittle insisted on a design that could supply water to the Mother Lode but for years he deadlocked with a combination of environmentalists and spending opponents led by the 5th District's Robert Matsui. Doolittle contended that alternative plans by the Army Corps of Engineers to repair and strengthen the Folsom Dam, which was completed in 1955, would be a waste of money. In 2001, Doolittle gave up the subcommittee to join the Appropriations Committee, where he has gotten many millions of dollars for projects for his district, including land acquisition, wastewater treatment facilities and restoration projects in the Lake Tahoe basin. That increased leverage helped Doolittle to finally reach a deal with Matsui in 2003, with an agreement to raise the Folsom Dam by seven feet and to spend $135 million on upstream water projects that Doolittle would largely determine. The once fiscally tight-fisted Doolittle had loosened up, and Sacramento got its long-sought flood protection. Because Congress does not operate in an ideal world, he told a local reporter, "I work with what I've got." The onetime foes became something of a mutual admiration society, and Doolittle noted after Matsui died the progress that they made in addressing local issues. After the reorganization of Appropriations subcommittees in 2005, Doolittle became vice-chairman of the Energy and Water Subcommittee.

On other issues, the iPod-toting Doolittle has taken a consumer interest in copyright policy. He introduced with Rick Boucher a bill to permit fair use copying of certain communications software; it would weaken the anti-circumvention rules of a 1998 copyright law and brought criticism from the motion picture industry. They also organized the Personal Technology Freedom Coalition. With Zoe Lofgren, he filed a bill on behalf of film preservationists and archivists to make it easier to restore old movies without having to pay copyright fees.

Doolittle has worked closely with Majority Leader Tom DeLay on several issues, including opposing the Shays-Meehan campaign finance bill. (Critics said that the duo preferred a "do little and delay" Congress.) During the 2002 debate, he described its partisan impact in apocalyptic terms. "If this passes, we lose the House. We may not lose it this time. … This is literally the survival of the Republican Party that is going on right now." As a leader of House conservatives, Doolittle was a co-founder of the Conservative Action Team, since renamed the Republican Study Committee, which has become a force in attempting to limit domestic spending. After the 2002 election, he was elected without opposition as secretary of the House Republican Conference; this is the lowest ranking position in the party leadership, but it gives him a seat at leadership meetings and he has used it to become the leadership liaison to House conservatives. He gained unwanted attention with news reports in 2004 that he had been a beneficiary of the fundraising largess of lobbyist Jack Abramoff and that Doolittle's wife Julie, who runs a fund-raising firm, was among those subpoenaed by a grand jury investigating Abramoff.

Back home he defeated Malberg in a 1992 rematch and has won more than 60% of the vote since. In 2002, against an active primary opponent who called the Auburn Dam a "boondoggle" and favored Shays-Meehan, he won 78%-22%. The outspoken Doolittle strongly opposed Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposal for nonpartisan redistricting, dismissing it as "self-defeating" for Republicans and "stupid" in its goal of seeking more moderates.

Committees

• Republican Conference Secretary
.
• Appropriations (26th of 37 R): Agriculture, Rural Development, FDA & Related Agencies; Energy & Water Development & Related Agencies (Vice Chmn.); Interior, Environment & Related Agencies.
• House Administration (4th of 6 R).

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2004	0	0	13	9	89	55	90	92	85	100	--
2003	5	--	0	0	--	62	93	78	--	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2003 LIB	--	2003 CONS		2004 LIB	--	2004 CONS
Economic	36%	--	63%		17%	--	80%
Social	5%	--	87%		0%	--	91%
Foreign	0%	--	89%		4%	--	93%
For National Journal's complete 2004 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 108th Congress (More Info)
1. Drilling in ANWR Y 2. Approve Bush Tax Cuts Y 3. Medicare/Rx Bill Y 4. Bar Overtime Pay Regs. N 5. DC School Vouchers Y 6. Ban Human Cloning Y		7. Restrict Gun Liability Y  8. Ban Partial-Birth Abortion Y  9. Ban Same-Sex Marriage Y 10. Fund Iraq War Y 11. Bar Cuba Embargo Funds N 12. Intelligence Reorg. Y

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2004 general	John Doolittle (R)	221,926	65%	$912,648
	David Winters (D)	117,443	35%	$2,061
2004 primary	John Doolittle (R)	unopposed
2002 general	John Doolittle (R)	147,997	65%	$979,438
	Mark Norberg (D)	72,860	32%	$7,548
	Other	7,649	3%
Prior winning percentages: 2000 (63%); 1998 (63%); 1996 (60%); 1994 (61%); 1992 (50%); 1990 (50%)

2004 Presidential Vote Bush (R) 216,838 (61%) Kerry (D) 132,267 (37%)

2000 Presidential Vote Bush (R) 172,169 (59%) Gore (D) 104,437 (36%)

For 1992 and 1996 presidential results in the Fourth District, please see the Almanac 2000 online. Please note that these older returns reflect district lines as they existed prior to 2002 redistricting.

• Cook Partisan Voting Index: R +11
• District Size: 17,159 square miles
• Population in 2000: 639,088; 67.4% urban; 32.6% rural
• Median Household Income: $49,387; 8.7% are below the poverty line
• Occupation: 19.6% blue collar; 63.1% white collar; 17.3% gray collar; 16.6% military veterans
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 83.8% White, 1.2% Black, 2.3% Asian, 1.1% Amer. Indian, 0.1% Hawaiian, 2.4% Two+ races, 0.2% Other, 8.9% Hispanic origin
• Ancestry: 13.1% German, 11.2% English, 10.1% Irish
• Click here for statewide demographic data.