LA Daily News: Re-elect Adam Schiff to House in 28th District: Endorsement
The Los Angeles Daily News endorses Congressman Schiff for re-election:
Adam Schiff is just the kind of member of Congress Southern California needs and sometimes is lucky enough to get, and he very much deserves re-election to his seat.
The outline of his district, now the 28th, has changed dramatically in the 13 years since Schiff was first elected to the House. Though its base remains in Burbank, where Schiff resides, a district that formerly was mostly in the San Gabriel Valley now includes only a small slice of west Pasadena. From there it heads all the way west to Hollywood and West Hollywood, and includes Echo Park, La Cañada Flintridge, La Crescenta, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Sunland and Glendale.
After his bruising first race against former incumbent Jim Rogan in 2001, both gerrymandering and Schiff’s fine record as a smart moderate have made him essentially unbeatable in subsequent races, in the old district and the new.
In 2012, Republican opponent Phil Jennerjahn took fewer than a quarter of the votes cast in the general election. This year, no GOP candidate even bothered to run against Schiff. His one opponent on the November ballot, Steve Stokes, is running as an independent with a libertarian point of view — though, naturally, he favors term limits as well. That may be the only way to get Schiff out of office, barring his eventual running for a higher one.
Not a glad-hander or especially eager to do the pancake-breakfast side of local politics, Schiff certainly is in touch with local issues; legislatively, he has been a bulldog, for instance on the complex issue of too much helicopter noise throughout dense Los Angeles County. It’s not as simple as the ever-expanding air fleet of police agencies. The Hollywood Hills, which are in his district, are often plagued by a buzz-bomb of tour copters whose pilots have maps to the stars’ homes at hand. Frustrated after years of inaction by the Federal Aviation Agency, Schiff finally teamed with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, authoring legislation requiring the FAA to act within the year to reduce helicopter noise through voluntary measures, or be forced to put in place regulations to reduce it. This month the agency finally said it will establish a complaint system for helicopter noise as a first step to gather data on noise and identify problem operators.
But Schiff has always been something of an internationalist, and has long been the House member most focused on the vexing issue of the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the former Soviet republics. Showing that bipartisanship is not entirely dead in this Congress, Schiff has partnered with Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., as co-chairs of the Congressional Nuclear Security Caucus.
Given ISIS, the Russians in Ukraine and other international crises, Schiff told the editorial board that some of the “great ideas” the caucus has been working on have been “taken over by the sweep of events.” They remain important, and we commend Schiff for keeping the issue alive.
He sees his legislative highlight of the last two years as working to end the intelligence community’s meta-data telephone records collection program, having the phone companies themselves maintain the records instead.
And in the run-up to the current Mideast bombing campaign by U.S. forces, Schiff has been adamant in his push to require congressional approval for what are clearly acts of war by our nation.
We strongly endorse Schiff’s re-election to Congress.
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Source: Los Angeles Daily News