Congressional District 45 needs a change. It's long overdue.
Rep. Michelle Steel (R-Seal Beach) may officially represent the northern Orange County district, but her far-right values and occasional dishonesty make her a poor choice for her constituents.
Fortunately, voters have an excellent alternative in Democrat Derek Tran, a consumer and workers’ rights attorney who also owns an independent pharmacy with his pharmacist wife. It’s no surprise, then, that he has aligned himself with other Democrats who are staunchly pro-small business. Unlike Steel, he believes in helping Americans obtain affordable, quality education and health care, and in respecting their freedom to make their own medical and family decisions.
As the son of Vietnamese refugees, he has a deep understanding of the interests and needs of that community, which is highly concentrated in the district.
Tran was not our first choice among Democrats in the primary, but that's not due to any shortcomings on his part. Another candidate had been more active in local politics. But Tran is knowledgeable, not only about the important issues facing Congress, but also about how D.C. politics works. He would hit the ground running.
Steel, for her part, is a conservative ideologue. She was a co-sponsor of a 2021 resolution declaring that life begins at conception and has a top rating from the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. She signed an amicus brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.
But earlier this year, she changed her mind and withdrew her name from the resolution, saying she believes in extremely limited exceptions to making abortion illegal. In other words, don't put too much faith in anything she says or does during an election year on the issue.
Steel is well aware that depriving women of their right to abortion is not a good idea for the voters in her district, an arc that stretches from Fountain Valley to Garden Grove and encompasses a small portion of Los Angeles County. In 2022, 55% of voters in this district supported Proposition 1, a state measure that guaranteed Californians the right to make their own reproductive health decisions.
Honesty — or the lack thereof — has been another problem for Steel. In 2022, he sent a mailer to Vietnamese Americans in the district that portrayed his opponent, Jay Chen, as a communist sympathizer. Chen is, in fact, a Navy reservist whose mother fled communist China. The message surely resonated with those voters who had fled the communist takeover of Vietnam and who detest anything that even remotely smacks of communism. It’s not a trick he’s likely to be able to pull off without trouble in competition with the son of Vietnamese refugees who served in the Army reserves for eight years.
Steel did not respond to requests for an interview with the editorial board, but his track record speaks loud and clear.
He voted against the economic interests of his district and then pretended he didn’t. He opposed the infrastructure bill in 2021 and when it passed and brought more than $8 million to his district, he took credit for it.
Removing Steel from office will also help prevent an extremist Republican majority in Congress that could strip Americans not only of their abortion rights but also of their marriage rights and their retirement and health care benefits, on which many of the people whose interests Steel is supposed to have at heart depend.
The voters of District 45 deserve an honorable member of Congress who will represent their interests. To achieve that, they should vote for Derek Tran.
