SACRAMENTO —Tim Donnelly arrived at the Assembly in late 2010 with big plans.
First on his list: a sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration. A plan to dismantle the state's air quality board was close behind.
In a Capitol dominated by Democrats, those proposals, unsurprisingly, went nowhere. And the cool reception extended to Donnelly himself, one of the Legislature's few tea party disciples.
The Republican from Twin Peaks, near Lake Arrowhead, had vowed during his campaign that he was "going to Sacramento to start the war," and he kept up the provocative oratory once he landed.
Donnelly is now running for governor, campaigning on many of the themes he sounded in his initial Assembly run: personal liberty, low taxes and small government. But even as he rails against the political establishment, he says that serving in the Legislature has changed him, particularly in how he deals with political adversaries.
"Instead of looking for ways I can do a frontal assault against this massive wall, I found a way to chip away at a single brick," Donnelly said. "The key is you have to pick the right brick, and that means people have to agree with it."
That's a notable departure from the approach he took when he first ran for office 31/2 years ago. Donnelly, formerly a small-business owner and leader in the Minuteman volunteer border-patrol group, told supporters that he had no interest in making friends in the Legislature.
"I'm going there to reach across the aisles to the enemies of freedom and annihilate them and pound them into the ground and take back our power," he said at a Tea Party Express rally in Barstow in October 2010.
He promised legislation based on a controversial immigration law passed in Arizona, parts of which have since been overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. It was the first bill he introduced.
The measure would have ended "sanctuary cities" by ordering state and local officials to comply with federal immigration laws. It would also have imposed strict penalties on businesses that did not verify the immigration status of employees.
A throng of supporters attended the bill's committee hearing, but the Democrats on the panel promptly killed the measure. Similarly, his bids to require photo identification to vote and to strip funding from the statewide high-speed rail project failed to make it past their first hearings.
An ardent gun-rights advocate, Donnelly offered several firearms bills that have languished. One would have eased the state's ban on the open carrying of weapons. Another, introduced after the mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school, would have created a plan for armed "marshals" on school premises.
In his first two-year term, just one of the 37 measures he introduced passed the Legislature: a resolution recognizing January as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. He has had more victories in his current term: two resolutions (one a reprise of the trafficking measure) and three bills that became law.
One bars state employees from helping the federal government detain terrorism suspects indefinitely in California — a change Democrats could support and a product of Donnelly's new approach. The proposal was a rebuke to a 2011 federal law requiring certain foreign terrorism suspects to be held by the military rather than move through the civilian justice system.
The bill forged an unexpected partnership between Donnelly and state Sen. Mark Leno, a staunchly liberal Democrat from San Francisco. Leno carried Donnelly's bill in the Senate. When the two lawmakers' names appeared side by side on the Senate's announcement screen, "there was some audible chuckling," Leno recalled.
Soon, Donnelly returned the favor, shepherding a Leno bill in the Assembly that streamlined the compensation process for those wrongfully convicted of crimes. It later became law.
Leno said Donnelly's libertarian streak offers chances for collaboration with some Democrats.
"That is where left meets right, at a libertarian point," Leno said.
Donnelly's relationship with his fellow Republicans is strained at times. He said the minority party is too willing to compromise, and after his first several weeks in the Capitol, he stopped attending the Assembly GOP's weekly lunches.
"I eat my lunch by myself," Donnelly said, adding he thought the confabs were "an impediment to really standing up for what I believe in."
