Craig Huey Wouldn't Be Venice's First Conservative Representative

When I moved to Venice, Jerry Brown was California's governor and Tom Bradley Los Angeles' mayor, so on a local level I expected the rest of our elected officials to be just as progressive.

Instead, Venice’s congressman was Robert K. Dornan, a conservative Republican.

The former fighter pilot was elected to represent Venice in 1976 and served until 1983. He regained a congressional seat in the 1984 elections by going to Orange County.

Before his final victory in 1994, Dornan posted signs at the polls in Spanish warning voters that they should be prepared to prove their citizenship in order to vote, which reportedly kept enough Latino voters away to tip the election to him. The signs were ultimately ruled illegal leading to Dornan’s eventual defeat by Loretta Sanchez in 1996.

Dornan successfully authored legislation to prevent federal abortions in the District of Columbia, in U.S. military hospitals worldwide, in federal prisons and on American Indian reservations.

He successfully prevented an easing of the ban on homosexuals serving in the military. "Every lesbian spearchucker is hoping I get defeated," Dornan said.

In 1995, in a speech on the House floor, he stated that President Clinton had "given aid and comfort to the enemy during the Vietnam War."  

Dornan was a big backer of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, an attempt to knock missiles out of the sky with other missiles that 28 years later has cost billions with little success. He backed the Osprey tilt rotor helicopter, another weapons boondoggle, that has yet to be deployed.

Why are Dornan’s positions relevant today? They are echoed by one of our congressional candidates, Craig Huey, an anti-abortion, evangelical Christian who has never held office.  

Huey wants to maintain high defense spending and make the Bush tax cuts permanent, while balancing the budget.

The only solution Huey presented would lead to draconian cuts in social programs while further impoverishing the middle class. It’s not enough that Sacramento is dysfunctional because of term limits; Huey wants to impose them on Congress.  

How does a tea partyer like Huey qualify for a runoff in this district, which is 45 percent Democratic and only 27 percent Republican? (An additional 22 percent decline to state party preference, according to the California Secretary of State's office).

Huey needed the support of only 4 percent of the registered voters in our congressional district, because only 18 percent of the electorate bothered to vote.  

A motivated minority trumps an apathetic majority every time. There is only one way to ensure that we have a member of Congress who truly represents Venice, and that is to vote July 12.