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Tough Senate president looking to leave her mark

After unexpected rise, Fitz-Gerald lauded, criticized

April M. Washington, Rocky Mountain News

Published August 26, 2006 at midnight

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When Colorado's Senate president needs a break from the hardball politics of the state Capitol, she slips away to her secluded mountain home in Coal Creek Canyon.

"When I come up here, I feel like I'm on vacation," said Joan Fitz-Gerald one recent afternoon as she relaxed on her deck overlooking Roosevelt National Forest.

Chewy, the family dog, announces the few visitors willing to make the hourlong trek up the canyon's winding roads, where cell phones go dead and voice mail is not an option offered by Qwest.

Her 2,700-square-foot home has all the creature comforts of modern life, but rocky, rugged Coal Creek Canyon in Jefferson County suits Fitz-Gerald's tough-as-nails reputation.

The 58-year-old New York City native is a gritty politician known for championing tough social issues and taking on political fights.

The recent special session and 2006 legislative session were no exceptions.

Fitz-Gerald and fellow Democrats helped write what is touted as the toughest anti-illegal immigration laws in the nation.

She pushed her caucus to call a special session on immigration this summer, even though she knew the party didn't have enough GOP crossover votes to pull off the feat.

Still, she feels the tactic helped force Republican Gov. Bill Owens to convene the session last month and to include Democratic proposals in it.

"Politics is not a safe place," Fitz-Gerald said. "If you want to make it a safe place, you're not doing your job."

Fitz-Gerald's and House Speaker Andrew Romanoff's political footwork thwarted Republicans' efforts to revive a ballot initiative tossed by the Colorado Supreme Court in June to deny illegal immigrants most government services.

"I think the strategy of the leadership and the discipline they showed was politically invaluable," said Floyd Ciruli, a political pollster. "They came out of the session with the image of helping craft the toughest anti-immigration bill in the country, and they got rid of an offensive ballot measure. It was a huge win."

Ciruli said Fitz-Gerald's brash leadership, in part, kept the special session from becoming a political disaster for Democrats who were portrayed by Republicans as soft on illegal immigration.

Unexpected success

Fitz-Gerald entered Colorado politics 16 years ago somewhat by happenstance.

And her rise as the first woman to lead the Colorado Senate and only female Senate president in the nation is nothing short of remarkable, political observers say.

When Democrats asked her to run for Jefferson County clerk in 1990, no one expected her to win. They needed a name on the ballot.

Fitz-Gerald pulled off an upset with old-fashioned door-to-door campaigning and became the first Democratic county officeholder elected in 16 years.

At the time Democrats tapped Fitz-Gerald to run for Jeffco clerk, she was a stay-at-home soccer mom, raising her two sons, Patrick and Matthew.

"She wasn't into the Martha Stewart way of life as far as being home making pies, keeping house," said her older sister, Maureen Hagan, of Forth Worth, Texas. "That's not Joan. She spent her time being there for her children and doing things for them."

Fitz-Gerald next made an unsuccessful run for Congress in 1996 before leaving the clerk's office two years later and politics altogether until 2000, when she ran for the state Senate and won.

Two years later, Republicans won back the Senate, and Fitz-Gerald made history when she became the first woman minority leader in Senate history.

In 2004, she led the Democratic effort to regain control of the Senate. At the same time, she was helping care for her dying 88-year-old-mother and a brother, who had been diagnosed with a fatal strain of leukemia.

"When you lose the ones you love the most, it's life altering. It gives you sense of how short your time is on here on Earth. I looked at all that I was doing, and thought, what if this is your only shot to leave your mark?"

Lawsuits and critics

Fitz-Gerald said when she leaves office she wants to be known for restoring effectiveness to state government and fairness to the Senate chamber.

But her critics say she has blatantly abused her power as president to pursue a personal grudge against the Catholic Church and to skirt term-limit laws.

Earlier this year, Republicans sued to keep her off the November ballot, claiming she was "gaming" the system by trying to serve longer than the standard eight years under term limits.

In January, a Denver judge ruled Fitz-Gerald, who was elected in 2000 to fill a vacancy, could run again.

"She really ignored the will of the voters and violated the spirit of term-limit laws by running for a third term," said former GOP Rep. Rob Fairbank, a vocal critic.

Clear Channel talk show host Dan Caplis accused Fitz-Gerald of trying to bankrupt the Catholic Church when she pushed a bill this session that would have let victims of past sexual assault sue their alleged abusers and employers if they helped cover up the crime.

"She grossly abused her power by hijacking the legislature to carry out a personal vendetta against the Catholic Church," Caplis said.

Her sex-abuse proposal died, and a small piece of Fitz-Gerald, a devout Irish Catholic, died with it. She says she still grieves for adults who were molested as children by priests and have never healed or received justice.

But Fitz-Gerald said she has no regrets drawing the political wrath of the Denver Archdiocese.

It cost her politically. The ordeal tested her faith, but it did not rattle it, she said.

"If your faith is that small, you needed to strengthen it anyway," Fitz-Gerald said. "Am I disappointed? Yes. I would like the hierarchy of the church to be more in tune with the theological and spiritual rather than the corporate side."

This session, Fitz-Gerald faced off against religious groups when she fought to get on the November ballot a measure to allow same-sex couples to establish domestic partnerships.

"Joan's a good, tough, stubborn Irish girl who wants to get stuff done and she doesn't play games," said Steve Welchert, a political consultant. "When you're born Catholic and you're named Fitz-Gerald, you get points for that."

New York girl

She and her two siblings grew up in midtown Manhattan in a two-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment, raised by a single mother who eked out a living teaching kindergarten.

Her father abandoned the family shortly after returning from World War II. He died when Fitz- Gerald was 10.

"All my mother wanted for us is stability," Fitz-Gerald said. "She would say that people who keep wondering why certain things happen and 'why me?' waste so much time."

Fitz-Gerald discovered a world beyond her poor circumstances in books. She was straight-A student and the class president all four years of high school, her sister said.

"She is smart. She doesn't care what other people think of her. I think that's what people value about her," Hagan said.

Fitz-Gerald came of age in the early 1960s when John F. Kennedy became America's first Irish Catholic president.

She was the ultimate Kennedy groupie, volunteering with two friends for Robert Kennedy's U.S. Senate campaign in 1964.

"They put us on the phones," Fitz-Gerald said. "We looked at each other and thought we were in heaven."

Her grandfather, James Larkin, was associated with Tammany Hall, the New York City political machine known for corruption.

"Joan would ask him what made Democrats so great," Hagan said. "He would say, 'It was the Democrats who saved the immigrants in New York City; and Tammany Hall may be corrupt, but they take care of their own.' "

Fitz-Gerald set her sights on becoming an attorney when she graduated in 1970 from Marymount Manhattan College.

She dropped out of Fordham Law School after sizing up her chances of being taken seriously as a female attorney.

"In those days, women rarely made partner at a law firm," she said. "Meanwhile, you're accumulating the same debt as your male counterpart."

At law school, she met her husband, John, who would eventually move the fifth-generation New Yorker and their two boys to Colorado in 1977 after landing a job with Gold Fields Mining Corp. in Lakewood.

Fitz-Gerald came to Colorado "kicking and screaming."

"I came home and said I got a job offer in Colorado," her husband said. "I had to hear how I'm taking her away from her large Catholic Irish family. She had 26 first cousins in New York alone."

Fitz-Gerald thought her stay here would be relatively short, but the family eventually fell in love with the West.

Open-door leaders

Fitz-Gerald is respected by Democrats and Republicans alike.

"She doesn't let anyone run over her, but she has a soft inner-core that few people ever see, especially in the Capitol," said Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon, D-Denver.

Former Sen. Norma Anderson, R-Lakewood, said Fitz-Gerald's fair and open-door leadership style is a noticeable change from when former GOP Senate President John Andrews presided over the chamber with a partisan iron hand.

The current Senate minority leader, Andy McElhany, said he and Fitz-Gerald have a good working relationship.

"I think she's a very good politician," said McElhany, a Colorado Springs Republican. "She assesses the political reality very quickly and accurately."

She's tough talking, but known for her sense of humor, often making light of her colleagues and herself.

Still, Fitz-Gerald is notoriously stubborn when she takes up a cause.

"She is often wrong," McElhany said. "But once her mind is made up, you're not going to convince her otherwise."

When asked what image of herself she hopes to leave behind, Fitz-Gerald gives this answer:

"I like people to remember that I was fair, I was straight forward and I cared."

Joan Fitz-Gerald

• Age: 58

• 1990, 1994: Jefferson County clerk and recorder

• 2000: Colorado Senate

• 2004: Senate President

• Family: Husband John J. Fitz-Gerald, lawyer; two sons, Matthew and Patrick, lawyers

• Favorite movie: Orson Wells' Jane Eyre

• Favorite books: To Kill a Mockingbird and Citizen Soldiers

• Hero: Mother

Joan Fitz-Gerald's district sprawls over six counties in central Colorado:

• Counties: all of Clear Creek, Gilpin, Grand and Summit; portions of Boulder and Jefferson.

• Voter registration: 36,990 unaffiliated; 35,190 GOP; 28,307 Democrats.

• Of note: District spans the Continental Divide, so is composed of both headwater and Front Range counties.

• Ski areas: Eight.