For Rep. Adam Schiff, the state of bipartisanship looked grim post-Jan. 6, 2021.
Two years ago, rioters breached the U.S. Capitol as Congress convened to certify the 2020 presidential election, which then-President Donald Trump had lost. The attacks resulted in five dead and many more injured.
Four Southern California Republicans — Jay Obernolte, Darrell Issa, Ken Calvert and Mike Garcia — voted against certifying the election results. More recently, the House Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol recommended the Department of Justice prosecute Trump on four charges, including for aiding an insurrection.
“After January 6, many of my Democratic colleagues decided that they would never work again with anyone who voted to overturn the election,” Schiff, D-Burbank, said. “Never cosponsor a bill with them; never work with them.”
But Schiff said he was faced with a difficult situation. He chaired the Intelligence Committee where a majority of the Republican members had voted to overturn the election. If he decided he wouldn’t work with any of them again, he would not be able to do the work of the committee.
So Schiff made the decision to prioritize getting the work of the committee done, he said — even if that meant working with Republicans.
But relationships across the aisle — and even amid the GOP — would never be the same.
“It really did poison the relationship between Democrats and Republicans in Congress,” Schiff, who sat on the Jan. 6 committee, said. “And not just between Democrats and Republicans, but also for courageous Republicans like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and others who stood up to Trump and stood up to those who tried to overturn the election.”
The speaker effect
Now, the troubled state of bipartisanship is revealing itself in the election of House speaker, Schiff’s colleague, Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Sherman Oaks, said.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, has lost 11 rounds of votes in a historic fashion over the past few days as about 20 hardline Republicans refuse to back him. Republicans only have a narrow majority in the House, and without at least some of their support, he hasn’t been able to secure enough votes to secure the speaker’s gavel.
“It’s hard to say that things have improved,” Sherman said. “Clearly, when you can’t get all the votes you need from one party, you should be able to get some votes from the other party. But so far, Kevin McCarthy hasn’t even hinted that he wants a Democratic vote.”
Rep. Norma Torres, D-Pomona, differentiates between the hardline Republicans holding up the speaker vote and others who are willing to work with colleagues in Congress.
“They’re here because they want a microphone and want to be bomb-throwers,” Torres said of the Republicans refusing to back McCarthy.
“But there are Republicans and Democrats that are here and want to get things done and work together,” she said, pointing to the bipartisan legislation passed over the past two years, including infrastructure bills and investments in manufacturing.
Rep. Mike Levin, who represents part of Orange and San Diego counties, said there are plenty of members on both sides who are more interested in getting work done.
“I try to seek out members like that and work with them,” Levin said. “And we’ve had a great deal of success in doing that.”
Levin recently joined hands with GOP Rep. Young Kim to announce a nearly $3.5 million grant for upgrades to the Orange County Intelligence Assessment Center, which will help the facility in addressing different types of crime.
“This is just one of many examples that despite those dark events of two years ago, we continue to work together in the best interest of our communities,” Levin said.
Shortly after the Jan. 6 attacks, Kim denounced the violence as “abhorrent” and said she was afraid the threats would continue. After she missed the first vote on Arizona’s election results due to possible exposure to COVID-19, Kim voted to certify the electoral votes from Pennsylvania.
In an emailed statement for this story, Kim said: “Despite the challenges we face, more unites us than divides us as Americans.”
Still, there are feelings of animosity many Democratic members feel toward Republicans who sought to overturn President Joe Biden’s election victory.
“It’s particularly hard when you think about folks who didn’t vote to certify the election results, and the fact that you have to work with them because that feels like a slap in the face to all of us who were there that day,” Rep. Linda Sanchez of Whittier, said.
“The people surrounding me did not have the courage of their convictions,” said Rep. Mark Takano of Riverside. “The courage of their own leadership ability. And they could not honorably tell their own supporters, ‘Donald Trump is telling you lies.’ They could not cast their vote for democracy and to honor the peaceful transition of power because they were too afraid of facing a primary challenge. This is a failure of leadership.”
“It has led to this moment right now that we’re witnessing, that we cannot elect a speaker,” Takano continued. “And frankly, everyone should be calling out extremists and rising up in anger, that a tiny group of 20 people is deciding how this is going to work. They should be faced down. Shame on the Republicans who will not face them down. Shame on the members of Jan. 6, including those Republican members in California who did not face down these extremists and did not face down Donald Trump. Shame on them because they are responsible for the chaos and dysfunction we see.”
The Southern California News Group reached out to several Southern California House Republicans for this story. Issa did not respond to requests for comment while Calvert and Orange County Rep. Michelle Steel, who didn’t vote on Jan. 6 after testing positive for COVID-19, declined to comment.
Calvert’s spokesperson, Jason Gagnon, said he was unavailable for an interview but pointed to some of his past comments on Jan. 6. Although he voted to overturn the election results, he previously told the Press-Enterprise: “No one should feel good about the violence that took place that day. That’s not good for our democracy.”
An inflection point
As with many of his colleagues, the attack on the Capitol two years ago served as an inflection point in Rep. Lou Correa’s political career.
The Orange County Democrat thought his life was going to end on Jan. 6, 2021. But the harrowing events of that day, he said, ended up solidifying his relationship with a number of Republicans.
“I had no doubt that that was going to be the end,” Correa said. “When we were trapped in the Capitol, it was Democrats and Republicans that were fighting for their life. And I made some of my best Republican friends that night because a number of us teamed up and said, ‘If we’re going down, we’re going down together.’ And so we were ready to fight hand-in-hand and shoulder to shoulder to protect ourselves.”
One of those good friends on the Republican side is Rep. Jack Bergman from Michigan, with whom he works with to lead a bipartisan caucus studying how psychedelic drugs can be used to treat substance abuse or mental health disorders.
But he said stories of politicians of different parties coming together don’t receive much attention due to the heavily polarized nature of American politics.
“You work across the aisle and everybody says, ‘Oh my, that’s a sin,’” he said. “You know, people say that’s a negative.”
But despite the chaos and dysfunction that came out of Jan. 6 and the ongoing House speaker drama, Correa said he believes bipartisanship stood its ground.
“There’s a lot of us, Democrats and Republicans, who are patriots. We love this country. And we want what’s best for this nation above party affiliation,” he said. “There were a lot of Democrats and Republicans not saying they were glad to see the Republicans having so much chaos (with the speaker vote). We saw it as a very sad moment in our history because the rest of the world is not going to say that Republicans can’t get it together. They’re going to say American democracy continues to be weak. American leadership continues to be weak.
“And the world is not going to distinguish between Democrats and Republicans. The world is going to say, this shows, again, that American democracy is at its peril.”
Beau Yarbrough contributed to this report.
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