On Wednesday the House approved by voice vote a Lungren amendment to an ethics reform bill that sets new rules for travel paid by outside interest groups. While the reform bill was bitterly divisive down to the final 217-213 vote, Lungren's bipartisan amendment was the one part that wasn't.

Then, a day later, the House passed by an overwhelming margin the Gold River Republican's bipartisan legislation to tighten port security. Even the scant opposition to that bill was bipartisan - just one Democrat, and one Republican.

"We had a very good week," Lungren said in an interview Friday. "This is what I was looking for when I came back."

Seventeen months ago when he began his second career in Congress - he had spent a decade in the House representing the Long Beach area before a 16-year hiatus that included eight years as California attorney general and a failed 1998 run for governor - Lungren was all about bipartisan cooperation.

The two measures last week demonstrated what he was talking about. In both instances the conservative Republican's success depended upon legislation worked out with liberal Democrats.

The ethics amendment was forged with Rep. George Miller of Martinez, a key policy adviser to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and Howard Berman of North Hollywood, the new ranking Democrat on the House ethics panel

"This is an indication of our ability to work in a bipartisan way," said House Rules Committee Chairman David Drier, R-San Dimas, complimenting Lungren and his Democratic colleagues for the bipartisan deal.

Rather than imposing a ban on privately financed travel, the Lungren-Miller deal assigns the House ethics panel to write rules governing it. Meanwhile, private travel is permissible as long as two-thirds of the ethics committee members agree to individual requests.

The ethics deal wasn't without some self-interest, however.

Miller and Berman are among the top 40 on a list maintained by the independent, nonpartisan campaign finance Web site PoliticalMoneyLine of House and Senate members who've taken advantage of privately paid junkets over the past five years.

Lungren is fast gaining on them, with 10 trips since his return to Congress, including expense-paid travel to Israel last year and Hawaii in January.

But Lungren said he sees the agreement as a way to dampen political divisions in the bitterly divided House. Acrimony breaks down when members get to know each other better, as they do on long trips, he said.

"To me, this is very important in terms of relationships among members," he said. "We are trying to figure out ways to break barriers to bipartisanship."

There was nothing self-serving in the port security bill that cleared the House on Thursday on a 421-2 vote.

It grew out of discord on Capitol Hill over the now-stymied plan by Arab-owned Dubai Ports World to take over management of major ports on the East Coast and in New Orleans.

"The silver lining to the controversy was that it focused attention for the first time since 9/11 on the security threats to our ports," Lungren said.

He is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee's panel on economic security and infrastructure protection. He turned to a leading House liberal, Rep. Jane Harman, D-Venice, in crafting the ports bill, which was being written when the ports controversy broke.

The bill passed 51 days after its introduction. It creates a $7.4 billion program to beef up port security and cargo monitoring. Key to the measure is the detection of terrorist bombs stowed in cargo containers before they are loaded onto U.S-bound ships leaving foreign ports.

The most controversial part of the bill was the extent of cargo inspections. Only about 6 percent of cargo containers entering the country now are inspected.

In one of the most heated exchanges, Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., charged that the Lungren bill, by not requiring 100 percent inspection of containers, left "a loophole big enough to drive a cargo container full of nuclear weapons material through."

But Lungren argued that there is no technology yet to reliably scan all containers before loading, and that as soon as there is, the bill requires the administration to begin negotiating for its use at foreign ports doing business with the United States.

Markey's motion to return the bill to committee was rejected on a 222-202 vote before the measure went on to easy passage.

Tim Ransdell, executive director of the California Institute of Federal Policy Research, said he sees the easy passage of Lungren's ethics provision and port security bill as an extension of his high regard for partisan cooperation during the decade he represented Long Beach. "He cut his congressional teeth when Democrats and Republicans were more collaborative," Ransdell said. "It comes naturally to him."

Lungren, who created a leadership political action committee that has raised about $17,000 to help elect Republicans, said his eye is on a long career in the House, and last week's successes only make him more energized.

"I saw during the 16 years I was away that there's so much you can do if you just concentrate on that," he said. "I am not going anywhere."