22 Years ago Orange County was much redder than it is now and the minority population has been growing. Ed Royce was first elected to congress in 1994 and has been re-elected easily every time. Royce is more of a traditional Republican and not a teabagger, but he is a deeply conservative congressman, named the "most conservative" in California by the Orange County Register. His seniority has earned him the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and he sits on the Committee on Financial Services. He identifies primarily as a fiscal conservative and his biggest backers are the financial services industry, but he is also a military hawk and social conservative. Some of his highlights:
- Voted against every immigration reform proposal
- Voted to privatize Social Security
- Voted to make the Patriot Act permanent
- Voted against renewing the Voting Rights Act of 1965
- Advocated making the controversial Arizona “SB 1070” (the law that lets cops demand documents from suspected immigrants) a federal law.
- Rated “A” by the NRA
- Voted against same-sex marriage and gay adoption
- Voted in favor of school prayer and school vouchers
- American Conservative Union lifetime score is 98 percent
This man does not represent the values of Californians and it is time he is given the boot.
Luckily, this year we have a very good candidate that was recruited by the DCCC to oppose Royce. Brett Murdock is a former City Council member and Mayor of the city of Brea. He is an attorney in private practice and a part-time professor of American Government at Cal State Fullerton. This race is winnable this year and we have a chance to replace a far-right congressman with a great Democrat! Royce won by 40,000 votes in 2012; could it be that 40,000 Republicans in LA and Orange County stay home because of Trump and the lack of a Republican Senate candidate in 2016?
I plan to write a much more in-depth post about Brett’s positions and the state of the district and the race, but wanted to get this district on the Daliy Kos radar screen as I have not seen it covered on the site.