January 06, 2023

How Jan. 6 impacted bipartisanship among California representatives

For some Southern California Democrats, reaching across the aisle to colleagues who voted to overturn the election was difficult following the insurrection.

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.”


By:  Hanna Kang
Source: The Orange County Register