Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R) Elected 1988, 9th term
Born:	June 21, 1947, Coronado
Home:	Huntington Beach
Education:	Long Beach St. Col. B.A. 1969, U. of S. CA, M.A. 1975
Religion:	Baptist
Marital Status:	married (Rhonda)
Professional Career:	Radio & print journalist, 1970-80; Sr. Speechwriter, Special Asst. to Pres. Reagan, 1981-88.
DC Office	2338 RHOB20515, 202-225-2415; Fax: 202-225-0145; Web site: www.house.gov/rohrabacher
State Offices	Huntington Beach, 714-960-6483.
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In the 1950s, when the Beach Boys were at Hawthorne High School, surfers would drive far down the coast to the vast expanse of Huntington Beach in Orange County to catch a wave. This was empty country then, vegetable fields and orange groves, with nary a freeway or shopping center in sight. Today a long stretch of the beach itself is eerily empty, with swampland across the highway where surfers' pickups are parked, but the rest of the 42-mile shoreline of Orange County is pretty much filled in. Pricey coastal resorts have become a popular destination. Huntington Beach is a city of 194,000, a mixture of family subdivisions and garden apartments and home of the International Surfing Museum. To the north is Westminster, the center of the nation's most prominent Vietnamese-American community, with miles of malls where all the shops have Vietnamese names and the area has its own Vietnamese-language daily newspaper. Southeast along San Diego Freeway is Fountain Valley, the central focus of many Asian-owned high-tech businesses, an engine of Southern California growth. Near the coast is Costa Mesa, site of South Coast Plaza's luxury stores. Out on the beach in Huntington Beach you can see the curving coastline to the west, past the port of Los Angeles and Long Beach to where the mountains of the seismically active and economically upscale Palos Verdes Peninsula rise above the water. Using "cold ironing" technology, plans are underway to cut air pollution from tankers in the busy port complex by equipping at least two BP tankers into onshore electricity so that they can shut down their diesel engines.

The 46th Congressional District of California includes all of this beachfront plus the Long Beach Harbor area and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. It also includes territory inland: the eastern end of Long Beach and next-door Seal Beach, areas settled by many retirees, most of Westminster, all of Fountain Valley, Costa Mesa, the southwest corner of Santa Ana and a tiny slice of Los Angeles. Over most of the distance the eastern part of the district is connected to the Palos Verdes Peninsula by just a thin strip of beach or the port area. Politically, the two ends of the district connected by this narrow corridor are solidly Republican, from high-income Palos Verdes to Westminster: Vietnamese there are mostly conservative, angry at America not for going into Vietnam but for leaving it. This is no longer the monoracial Orange County of the 1960s: the district's population is 17% Hispanic and 15% Asian.

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. He grew up in southern California, went to college and experimented with drugs, and once had a folk band called the Goldwaters. He was a press aide in the 1976 and 1980 Reagan presidential campaigns, wrote editorials for the Orange County Register and was a speechwriter in the Reagan White House. He returned to Southern California in 1988 when Long Beach-based Congressman Dan Lungren decided not to run again (Lungren was elected attorney general in 1990 and 1994, and in 2004 was elected to the House again in the 3d District 400 miles away). Rohrabacher, with fundraising help from Oliver North, won the primary with 35% of the vote, to 22% for an Orange County supervisor and 20% for Steve Horn, who later represented a Long Beach-based district. After redistricting in 1992, Rohrabacher tussled with Robert Dornan and won, running in this heavily Republican district while Dornan ran in the inland seat which, after a quixotic presidential campaign, he lost in 1996.

A self-styled free spirit, Rohrabacher likes to make waves in the House. His Web site once featured the motto: "Fighting for freedom and having fun." His voting record can be unpredictable, especially on cultural issues. That helps to explain why he remains assigned to 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. After the Columbia disaster in February 2003, he quickly noted that he had raised questions about the safety of the aging space shuttle. He said that a manned space flight to repair the Hubble space telescope was not worth the risk. In December 2004, George W. Bush signed his bill to promote the development of the commercial human space flight industry; the law is aimed at protecting the fledgling space travel industry from overregulation and provides relief from legal liability.

In 2005, after House Republicans' six-year term limit clicked in, Rohrabacher left the Space chairmanship and became chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee on International Relations, an area where he already had stirred the waters. As a White House aide, he traveled in November 1988 with a mujahedeen militia unit for one week. "Half of our group was napalmed," he said. 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. He visited liberated Afghanistan in April 2002 and complained that the Pentagon imposed too many limits on his visit. Rohrabacher has been a long-time critic of China's rulers and strongly opposed normal trade relations. In 2001, the House soundly defeated his attempts to block expanded trade 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 July 2002, after a lengthy delay while he paced the House floor, he cast one of the final votes that secured the passage by one vote of trade promotion authority for President Bush. He went through a similar routine in November 2003 before finally voting for the Medicare/prescription drug bill; in exchange, Republican leaders gave him a vote on his bill to require hospitals to report potential illegal immigrants to the Homeland Security Department. In 2004, with in-vitro fertilization and at age 56, he and wife Rhonda became the parents of triplets. Later he became an advocate of embryonic stem-cell research.

Rohrabacher has been routinely reelected by wide margins. In 2002 his Democratic opponent was Gerrie Schipske, a nurse practitioner and attorney who lost to Republican Steve Horn in 2000 in the old 38th District by only 48%-47%. But this was a much less Democratic district; Schipske raised only one-third as much money as in 2000, and Rohrabacher won 62%-35%. In the 2004 primary, he was challenged by his former colleague Robert Dornan, who had become a radio talk-show host. Rohrabacher won 84%-16%.

Committees

• International Relations (7th of 27 R): Asia & the Pacific; Oversight & Investigations (Chmn.).
• Science (5th of 24 R): Research; Space & Aeronautics.

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2004	15	10	13	18	40	80	85	91	94	84	--
2003	15	--	0	5	--	72	80	88	--	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2003 LIB	--	2003 CONS		2004 LIB	--	2004 CONS
Economic	21%	--	75%		41%	--	58%
Social	40%	--	58%		36%	--	61%
Foreign	51%	--	48%		25%	--	68%
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	Dana Rohrabacher (R)	171,318	62%	$517,315
	Jim Brandt (D)	90,129	33%	$85,456
	Tom Lash (Green)	10,238	4%
	Other	5,005	2%
2004 primary	Dana Rohrabacher (R)	69,132	84%
	Robert Dornan (R)	13,630	16%
2002 general	Dana Rohrabacher (R)	108,807	62%	$380,008
	Gerrie Schipske (D)	60,890	35%	$228,084
	Keith Gann (Lib)	6,488	4%
Prior winning percentages: 2000 (62%); 1998 (59%); 1996 (61%); 1994 (69%); 1992 (55%); 1990 (59%); 1988 (64%)

2004 Presidential Vote Bush (R) 168,158 (57%) Kerry (D) 122,991 (42%)

2000 Presidential Vote Bush (R) 145,729 (55%) Gore (D) 110,984 (42%)

For 1992 and 1996 presidential results in the Forty-Sixth 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 + 6
• District Size: 825 square miles
• Population in 2000: 639,088; 99.9% urban; 0.1% rural
• Median Household Income: $61,567; 7.8% are below the poverty line
• Occupation: 15.4% blue collar; 72.7% white collar; 11.9% gray collar; 11.3% military veterans
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 62.8% White, 1.4% Black, 15.4% Asian, 0.3% Amer. Indian, 0.3% Hawaiian, 2.6% Two+ races, 0.2% Other, 16.9% Hispanic origin
• Ancestry: 10.7% German, 8.5% English, 8.4% Irish
• Click here for statewide demographic data.