More Photos (1):

Other articles by Tony Davis:

AZ Senate fails to act on gas-storage cavernVote pending on exemptions for underground gas storage Killing lions to save sheep faulted Natural gas threatens water, critics sayAZ wanted a jaguar collared despite 2 deaths in Sonora Ex-Gov. Castro, 93, reflects on AZ issues Audubon: Climate change is shifting bird migration Lawmakers decry US stance that it can't block Rosemont mine Bear, lion track count ends after 20-year run$900M financing sought for mine

Administrative & Professional
Tucson Urban League
CEO/President Sales and Marketing
Everready Glass
Sales Reps Health Care
Dependable Health Services
Physical Therapists Mechanical
Komatsu Equipment Co
Resident Field Mechanic Finance and Accounting
Charles E. Gillman Company
Accounting Specialist Construction
West-Press
Printing Administrative & Professional
Jorgensen Brooks Group
Counselor

The national Republican Party's emphasis on gay marriage, abortion, stem-cell research and other social issues helped cost it control of Congress, said Jim Kolbe on the eve of stepping down after 22 years as a GOP congressman.

Capping a career in which he often clashed with his party's social conservatives, Kolbe called the congressional leadership's handling of the most recent session "abysmal."

He said the American public got tired of watching the party neglect its basic principles, such as fiscal discipline, smaller government and a strong national defense.

Kolbe leaves office Wednesday after spending most of his career advocating fiscal conservatism, military preparedness, free trade and reforms of both immigration policy and Social Security.

He announced in 2005 that he would not seek reelection this November — an election in which his party went on to lose its majorities in both houses to the Democrats for the first time in 12 years.

In an interview last week in the living room of his Midtown Tucson home, Kolbe also defended his role in a camping and river-rafting trip he took to the Grand Canyon with two former congressional pages in 1996.

He said the trip included members of his staff and National Park Service staff, making it "completely aboveboard," "a very legitimate trip" and "a terrific exercise for 12 people over three days."

The trip is, however, the subject of a pending federal inquiry.

Kolbe also repeated his earlier denial that he had ever read a sexually explicit message written to one of his former pages by then-Rep. Mark Foley of Florida, who resigned this fall. The former page had forwarded the message to Kolbe in 2001, a House ethics report on the Foley scandal recently concluded.

"The page urged us … to 'Please ask Foley to stop,' " Kolbe said. "We did that. The messages stopped coming." He would not discuss the page issue further.

In the interview, Kolbe also:

● Predicted that the border fence recently approved by Congress will never be built because the new Democratic Congress won't appropriate money for it and President Bush won't ask for money for it.

● Said he thinks the United States will dramatically scale back its military involvement in the Iraqi war's day-to-day operations by 2008, although it will not necessarily reduce troop levels there that soon.

● Acknowledged that if he'd known then what he knows now about Iraq, he wouldn't have voted to authorize going to war in 2002. But he said he still believes the best information available at that time made a good case for the invasion then.

● Predicted that some form of U.S. protection of gay marriage or civil unions will exist in a decade or two.

● Faulted his party's recent leadership on the environment, saying it went too far in supporting the interests of development. "The people are concerned about the environment, global warming, the loss of public lands and environmental degradation," he said.

On Iraq, Kolbe said the United States so far has not done enough to train Iraq's military forces, policemen and firemen to protect the country against the insurgency.

"We've got to get rid of the perception that the security forces over there are pro-Shiite or pro-Sunni — they've gotta be perceived as pro-Iraqi," he said.

He said the worst thing the U.S. could do would be to set a formal timetable for withdrawing troops.

"That would be tantamount to Roosevelt saying back in 1942 that 'we win World War II by 1943 or we withdraw,' " Kolbe said.

On gay marriage, he said it or civil unions will be pretty widespread in this country in a decade or two because it is a fundamental human right that people should be able to legally celebrate the commitment of relationships.

"Friends of mine in New York have been together for 45 to 50 years," Kolbe said. "Shouldn't we celebrate that?"

But with the exception of one point, Kolbe said he didn't regret his 1996 vote in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act, which allows states to refuse recognition of gay marriages approved in other states. His vote on that bill prompted a gay-oriented magazine to prepare an article "outing" him as a homosexual, which led Kolbe to publicly declare that he is gay.

"I could make a very good argument that marriage belongs in the hands of the state," he said. "I don't think that should be changed."

His regret on that vote centers on the act's failure to grant participants in gay marriages, in states where they are legal, the right to federal benefits such as Social Security and Medicare earned by one's partner — the same rights that spouses in traditional marriages have.

"What I would say now … I recognize that we have to have some protection at the federal level," Kolbe said.

He also regrets a vote he made in his first year in Congress granting American copper producers certain protections against foreign competition. "I thought then that this goes against free trade, which is one of my basic principles, always. I have not done this again."