Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Page 3
Former Attorney General Dan Lungren Seeks Sacramento Area Seat in Congress
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Former California Attorney General Dan Lungren yesterday formally announced his candidacy for a Sacramento-area congressional seat.
Lungren, who first disclosed his plans to run for the seat of retiring GOP Rep. Doug Ose a month ago, served in the House from 1979 to 1989. At that time he represented a district including parts of Los Angeles and Orange counties.
Serving in Congress, he said yesterday in a release, is “a job I know well.”
The Third Congressional District, where Lungren will run, stretches across the Sacramento Valley and runs to the Nevada border, taking in all of Alpine, Amador and Calaveras Counties, all of the rural portions of Sacramento County and a small portion of Solano County. Those boundaries, reconfigured two years ago, make it highly likely that the Republican primary winner will capture the seat.
Lungren is likely to face state Sen. Rico Oller, R-San Andreas, in the primary. While Lungren was viewed as a solid conservative throughout his tenure as a congressman and attorney general, some observers in the district have portrayed Oller as the more conservative of the two.
At a news conference yesterday, Lungren attacked the “savaging of [state Supreme Court] Justice Janice Rogers Brown” by opponents of her nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
“What they are doing to Janice Rogers Brown is an insult to the people of California,” Lungren said. In his release, he promised “to be a strong advocate fro the President’s judicial appointments, particularly those from California.”
House members have no vote on judicial appointees, who are nominated by the president and voted on by the Senate.
Lungren, 57, was the Republican nominee for governor in 1998, losing to Democrat Gray Davis. Lungren also was nominated for state treasurer in 1988 by then-Gov. George Deukmejian to fill a vacancy created by the death of Jesse Unruh, but the nomination was rejected by the state Senate after Lungren moved his family to the Sacramento area.
He served as attorney general from 1991 to 1999, winning praise from law enforcement, victim’s rights advocates, and prosecutors for his stances on criminal justice issues. He also took strong stands on social issues, opposing abortion rights and the extension of legalized gambling.
He was named the MetNews Person of the Year for 1995.
Copyright 2003, Metropolitan News Company