State’s largest pension fund down since last year

Good morning!

Lots of ethics and campaign finance stuff to get to today, but first:

“The California Public Employees Retirement System – the nation’s largest – lost about 2 percent of its market value in the fiscal year that just ended, according to unofficial numbers published last week on the CalPERS website. This came despite doubled-down efforts to beef up its bottom line,” writes The Orange County Register.

In other news:

• “San Diego Rep. Scott Peters and his family have been involved in a series of donation exchanges with the families of other congressional candidates, apparently legal trade-offs that allowed more money to flow to each campaign than might be allowed under contribution limits,” writes The San Diego Union-Tribune.
• “State Controller Betty T. Yee, the chief fiscal officer of California, has agreed to $2,082 in fines to be paid to the state political watchdog agency to settle seven charges that her campaign committee was late in reporting contributions before the 2014 election,” writes the Los Angeles Times.
• “An Oakland company is facing $114,400 in state and city fines for laundering campaign contributions to several former mayoral and City Council candidates, including Councilwomen Rebecca Kaplan and Desley Brooks, officials said Monday,” writes SF Gate.
• “The money is piling up on behalf of campaigns for 17 statewide ballot measures — the most since March 2000. And when it comes to big backers, Big Pharma is far and away the towering force,” writes The San Jose Mercury News. 

Legislature:

• Gone ’til August.

Gov. Brown:

• On vacation.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New followers: @AngeRosie @PacMediaGuild

Fresh faces

Three have come from the private sector, with two making their political debut. Rep. John Garamendi, D-Walnut Creek, will draw a challenge from trauma surgeon N. Eugene Cleek, although, according to Roll Call, Garamendi’s district has been marked safe, the Times added.

And in a race drawing some national attention, San Diego businesswoman Denise Gitsham, who boasts significant work experience in Washington, announced her candidacy two weeks ago against Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego. Last year, Peters edged out San Diego city councilman Carl DeMaio by just four points, raising hopes among Republicans of a pickup this time around.

DeMaio notably re-teamed last month with former San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed on a new ballot initiative aimed at threading the needle of popular support for public pension reform. The effort would trim benefits “only for future employees, thereby leaving the promises made to current workers untouched,” as the Sacramento Bee reported in October. “The measures also appeal to Californians who, according to a recent survey by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, strongly support the idea of controlling pension benefits for new hires via the ballot box.” He has not opted to try again against Peters, whose district Roll Call has also marked safe.

An unusual profile

Campaign Photo: Denise Gitsham

Gitsham, however, has mustered a level of support of a different quality and quantity than Peters might have anticipated. “The daughter of a Chinese mother who immigrated through Taiwan, and a Canadian-born father who moved to New Jersey and spent 20 years in the Air Force,” Gitsham, as U-T San Diego noted, wound up in Texas, where she worked for Karl Rove to elect George W. Bush president. “She then gained a post in the White House and worked for Harriet Miers, the president’s counsel and one-time Supreme Court nominee,” the paper added. “Gitsham later graduated from law school at Georgetown University and practiced in Washington with a K Street firm.”

In addition to a resume relatively distinctive in current state Republican politics, Gitsham has amassed some notable numbers in the early race to fundraise. (She will face a primary challenge from former Marine Jacquie Atkinson.) In a press release and on Facebook, Gitsham’s campaign trumpeted its haul of $100,000 in its first week. “It’s clear people want a fresh face in Congress and they are responding to my candidacy,” Gitsham said. “There’s a lot of work to do but I’m really encouraged by our start.”

Precarious positioning

Despite Peters’ safe rating, data collected by the NRCC has indicated that Gitsham’s campaign appears to be a good bet this election season. “Recent polling by the National Republican Congressional Committee shows that incumbent Scott Peters is one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the country,” as Gitsham’s release went on. “Only 34 percent of voters believe Peters deserves reelection, while 46 percent want someone new.”

One indication of Peters’ political position, according to analysts, was his willingness to side with Republicans and vote for the so-called SAFE Act, designed to tighten screening for Syrian and Iraqi refugees. “The administration has not made the case to me that today’s bill will shut down or unduly delay our existing process,” Peters said in a statement, according to KQED News. “It is not too burdensome for federal agencies to certify that admitted refugees will not endanger our communities.” San Diego has already become home for one of the state’s biggest communities of Syrian refugees, observed KQED.

Peters is still considered hugely vulnerable. While he was on the San Diego City Council from 2000-2008, the city plunged into a financial crisis over decisions to intentionally underfund pension payments for retirees. This led to national ridicule and the 2005 resignation of Mayor Dick Murphy. Peters’ defensive framing of his behavior during the scandal — blaming his staffers and a media allegedly devoted to inventing scandal — flabbergasted even some of his supporters.

After their huge success in the past three House elections, national GOP operatives have been hunting for a San Diego Republican to take on Peters in 2016 in the belief that the centrist Democrat was one of the relatively few incumbents vulnerable in a national election — one in which Barack Obama would no longer help spike voter turnout among minorities and young whites.

Monday afternoon, it appeared they thought they had their man: a San Diego Republican who stomped Peters in the 2008 primary to be San Diego’s city attorney:

National Republicans are in talks with a potential challenger to California Rep. Scott Peters, whose tossup district makes him a perennial target.

San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith is slated to have a phone conversation soon with Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., recruitment chairman at the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to a source with knowledge of the discussion.

The NRCC doesn’t overtly play in primaries, but an aide there said Goldmith is “a candidate of interest” to run against Peters in the 52nd District. The Democrat was one who got away last cycle, as Republicans picked up seats in the House and Senate across the country.

“He definitely is a candidate whose bio is appealing to us, and somebody we are interested in talking to,” the NRCC aide said when reached by CQ Roll Call.

Within an hour, Goldsmith’s spokesman ridiculed Congressional Quarterly’s report as simply wrong. His language seemed categorical:

He has, “No plans to run. No plans to make plans. If nominated, he will not accept. If elected, he will seek a recount,” said Gerry Braun, communications director for the San Diego City Attorney’s office.

Borrowing from William F. Buckley’s jokes in his 1965 run for mayor for New York City may make some smile, but the national GOP won’t be happy. So their hunt will resume for a good 52nd district candidate.

Unless Goldsmith changes his mind. In 2008, when the state judge, former Poway mayor and former state assemblyman ran for San Diego city attorney, he defeated incumbent Mike Aguirre and Peters in the primary and then trounced Aguirre in the runoff.

After his 32 percent to 20 percent defeat of Peters in a head-to-head election in 2008, Goldsmith may not see Peters as particularly formidable.

Obviously, there’s been focus-group testing galore that leads Dems to think this theme is powerful and resonates with independent voters. And so the decision to make the race a referendum on the Tea Party.

But the 52nd congressional district isn’t West Los Angeles or Marin County. It covers mostly affluent coastal and northern San Diego and went decisively for Mitt Romney, a part-time resident of the district, in 2012.

And given the fact that DeMaio is gay, the usual tactic of depicting tea party members as social conservative extremists doesn’t work so well — the “war on women” shtick, etc. Here’s an example of this framing, a Washington Post story headlined “Social conservatives are mobilizing in France, leading to talk of a tea party.”

It’s quite possible that Democrats and some in the media actually don’t realize that the Tea Party is fundamentally libertarian — devoted to liberty and small government — and is not a conspiracy-mongering birther front. When the only people you listen to are those on MSNBC and Daily Kos, and Paul Krugman, you’re inclined to see all Republicans as contemptible haters.

Tea Party no fan of GOP establishment’s views on immigration

Yet the more sophisticated observers get that the Tea Party really is at odds with the modern GOP establishment — not just on its habit of giving in and accepting the big-spending federal status quo but on immigration. This isn’t just an anecdote-based claim. This info is from Thomas Edsall, the veteran journalist who for decades has actually tried to bring political science research into political journalism:

Parker and Barreto conducted surveys to see if Tea Party conservatives differ from non-Tea Party conservatives. … the two kinds of conservatives diverge significantly on key issues: immigration, civil liberties and in how they see President Obama.

The surveys showed that 50 percent of Tea Party-identifying members opposed the DREAM Act vs. 30 percent of non-Tea Party conservatives; 66 percent of Tea Party-identifying members opposed the path to citizenship for illegal immigrants vs. 46 percent of non-Tea Party conservatives; and that 58 percent of Tea Party-identifying members correlated more immigration with more crime vs. 49 percent of non-Tea Party conservatives.

But other surveys show Tea Party members more likely than standard conservatives to reject limits on abortion and gay marriage — the social issue litmus tests. They’re not bomb-throwers on social wedge issues.

Tea Party members I’ve talked with often say they back higher immigration — but with a Canada-style approach valuing applicants with needed job skills, not a system in which immigrants essentially self-select.

DeMaio is in the real-border-security-first camp.

But he’s not making it a key theme in this very interesting congressional race.

Here’s a Breitbart account of how DeMaio is responding to the Tea Party narrative: by ridiculing it.

No one of any Dem stature ever said anything when a police officer union member identified Republican DeMaio on his blog with a pink signifier. No Dem insider ever said anything publicly about Bob Filner’s repulsive attempts throughout the 2012 mayoral campaign to remind voters that “hey, Carl’s gay!” Or to repudiate recent DUI arrestee Ben Hueso’s X-rated, unsubstantiated allegations about what DeMaio purportedly did in the bathrooms of City Hall.

Tolerance is not required when it doesn’t suit Democrats or their de facto media allies, even those most likely to moralize about bigotry. Instead, 1940s-style sniggering about sexuality is fine when the target is a Republican. Shades of the way Democrats shrug off Harry Reid’s and others’ racially charged criticism of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ intelligence, even though legal blogs across the spectrum consider him a better writer and a more interesting legal mind than most of his colleagues.

Now San Diego machine Democrats — and Democrats in East Coast Super PACs flooding San Diego’s airwaves with hit ads — will have to decide whether to use outrageous new allegations against DeMaio. As a sign of how important the national parties consider the 52nd Congressional District race pitting DeMaio and first-term incumbent Scott Peters, Politico covered the scandal as it broke:

A high-profile Southern California congressional race descended into chaos on Wednesday when Republican Carl DeMaio was peppered with questions from reporters about whether he had sexually harassed and then intimidated and attempted to bribe a former campaign staffer.

At a news conference at his campaign headquarters, DeMaio called the allegations “absolutely untrue” and a “complete lie.” He added that authorities had questioned him and his campaign staff about the harassment claims, concluded they were unfounded and closed the case. DeMaio, 40, said the accuser concocted the story after he was identified as a “prime suspect” in a break-in at DeMaio’s campaign office last spring.

“All the evidence that was collected by the police department clearly indicated this individual was the prime suspect, and, it’s unfortunate, but we will continue to allow the district attorney to proceed with her case and weighing the case to prosecute for the break-in of our office,” said DeMaio, a former San Diego city councilman trying to unseat Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) in one of the nation’s most competitive House races.

What I’m hearing as a San Diego journo is that DeMaio is on solid ground in denying everything. That appears to be what Peters believes as well. He didn’t bring up the allegations at a Thursday debate.

But, hey, it’s been reported on. I expect the attack ads by Friday afternoon at the latest.

Democrats can’t wait to insinuate a gay Republican is a reprobate.

The only theory that makes sense is that it was former GOP Mayor Jerry Sanders holding a grudge. Sanders is now chair of the San Diego-Imperial counties Chamber of Commerce. He dislikes DeMaio because they both claim credit for a lot of the reforms accomplished in San Diego in recent years, and because DeMaio — much younger and relatively new to San Diego — was anything but deferential to Sanders, who is 64 and has been a San Diego fixture for decades.

Whatever drove the decision, it is sure making the U.S. Chamber of Commerce look foolish. Consider a recent essay highlighted on the chamber’s website:

The most important issue you probably won’t hear about during the run up to this year’s election is public sector pension liabilities. Even though it accounts for billions of dollars in spending and affects millions of state and municipal employees, the sad state of many pension funds barely makes a blip on the radar.

At its core, adequately funding pensions is about keeping a promise. Public sector employees were told while they were working what they would receive when they retired. Governments have a responsibility to ensure that they put enough money away to meet those obligations.

Pension deceit and ‘likely’ securities fraud

An institution that believes this shouldn’t be endorsing pension arsonists. But that is what the U.S. chamber did when it endorsed Scott Peters, who in 2002 voted to raise pensions while reducing funding. What did a 2006 fact-finding investigation conclude?

A culture of obfuscation and denial so corrupted San Diego’s financial management that its meltdown reached the historic levels of such poster children of governmental and corporate malfeasance as Orange County, Enron and WorldCom, according to a long-awaited report released Tuesday.

The report likely cements San Diego’s collapse as one of the greatest in modern municipal history, stating that eight former city staff members likely committed securities fraud in acting with “wrongful intent” to withhold important information from the investing public – a finding that could foreshadow potential enforcement actions from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Mayor Dick Murphy and a number of current and former City Council members acted negligently in approving false financial statements released to investors, the report states, a finding that would put their behavior on the bottom rung of the three levels of potential securities fraud.

In all, the report paints the picture of a culture premised upon “non-transparency, obfuscation, and denial of fiscal reality” that repeatedly sought to delay the impact of tough decisions, ignored pertinent advice time and again, and failed to inform investors of the consequences of its actions.

That’s from the Voice of San Diego. Among the negligent City Council members: Duke Law School grad Scott Peters.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce: We’re for pension reform. Also pension abuse.

Peters was elected in 2012 despite running in an affluent district ranging from Coronado to Rancho Bernardo that voted for Mitt Romney. He benefited from having a rough-edged GOP incumbent, Brian Bilbray, who had rubbed a lot of people the wrong way over his years in Congress and as a local politician.

DeMaio has also rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Though he helped bring major reforms and efficiencies to San Diego during his four years on the City Council, his hard-charging style offended even some Republicans, including then-Mayor Jerry Sanders. This may have led to the out-of-left-field decision last month of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to endorse Peters over DeMaio; Sanders now leads the San Diego chamber.

An architect of ‘Enron by the Sea’

But what’s peculiar and disheartening about the campaign is that Peters’ history isn’t coming back to haunt him. In 2002, he was part of a City Council majority that made the disastrous decision to underfund pensions while increasing benefits. It doesn’t get much dumber than that. This decision so undermined city finances that it led to national embarrassment — San Diego was dubbed “Enron by the Sea” — and to the 2005 resignation of Mayor Dick Murphy.

Incredibly, Peters didn’t think contrition was appropriate for his role in this debacle. At times, he’s depicted himself as a victim in the scandal. At other times, he’s suggested it was much ado about nothing. Here’s what I wrote in 2006 after an independent report by the Kroll firm blasted the 2002 City Council for negligence and malfeasance:

I’ve watched the City Council’s reaction to the Kroll report and its fallout with a steadily escalating sense of disbelief and fury. It’s obvious the five still-serving council members named as culpable in the 2002 pension scam hope that Kroll’s particulars will be forgotten and that their political careers will not suffer as a result. If that happens, that will be a disgrace.

The five should be running scared for their political lives. Recall petitions should be making the rounds. Instead, incredibly enough, Toni Atkins, Donna Frye, Jim Madaffer, Brian Maienschein and Scott Peters are all reportedly interested in seeking higher office.

All but Frye offer a weird variant of the Nuremberg Defense for their malfeasance. Instead of saying they were only following orders and were therefore not responsible, they say they were only following staff advice and were therefore not responsible.

Guilty pols advance to Congress — and Assembly leadership

But some of the City Council members didn’t just blame staff.

Even more ridiculously, Peters and Maienschein imply they are victims.

“People are really tired of looking backward and they really want to see some progress,” Peters told the U-T in a story in which he said “his lawyer advised him to be critical of the report.” Got that? He’s just too noble to point out the flaws in a report that makes a slam-dunk case he did such a horrible job as councilman in 2002 that it will haunt San Diego for decades to come.

Maienschein is much worse. In a published letter responding to a critical editorial, first he grossly misrepresented what the Kroll report said about his culpability, then he whined about those whose superior reading-comprehension skills led them to conclude the report said he and his colleagues were rotten public servants:

“[To] consistently attack the very people who make personal and professional sacrifices in order to serve their city on the City Council only does a disservice to our city by keeping honest, community-oriented people out of politics,” he wrote.

So much for my assumption that incompetence compounded with blame-ducking would hurt the careers of those involved. Atkins is now Assembly speaker. Maienschein holds a safe seat in the Assembly. And while Peters is in a difficult re-election fight, the super PAC ads targeting him don’t mention his 2002 fiasco and bizarre subsequent comments on it. They focus on his votes in Congress.

In San Diego, political karma is nowhere to be found.

A new report published by the GOP congressional candidate identified 102 members of Congress that receive public pensions on top of their congressional salaries. That’s nearly one in five members of Congress that double, and in some cases, triple-dip from taxpayer funds.

“I’m perfectly fine being the skunk at the party,” DeMaio, a frequent critic of government waste, told the Wall Street Journal.

The report, Congressional Pension Double-Dippers Club, was first published by the Wall Street Journal today and immediately sparked controversy inside and outside the Beltway. The single biggest recipient of a government pension on top of a congressional salary is Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, who takes home a whopping $253,323 per year from the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System.

California politicians named in report

Unsurprisingly, with the largest congressional delegation, California topped the country with 19 members on the list, including both of California’s Democratic U.S. Senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. Boxer receives a meager $4,445 pension a year from the Marin County Employees Retirement Association, while Feinstein collects $54,925 every year from the city and county of San Francisco.

Of the 17 Democrats and two Republicans on the list, Rep. John Garamendi, D-Solano, received the highest pension — $88,000 per year. He is a former state legislator (vested before their pensions were canceled with Proposition 140 in 1990), lieutenant governor and insurance commissioner.

“Garamendi’s multiple government pensions tally up to over $88,800 a year,” the report notes. “It’s hard to be a double-dipper, but even harder to be a triple and quadruple dipper!”

Other notable California politicians that collect pensions on top of their salary are Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Elk Grove; Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose; and Rep. Lois Capps, D-Santa Barbara, all of whom are locked in competitive races in June.

Rep. Scott Peters donates pension to charity

DeMaio’s report also singled out his congressional opponent, Rep. Scott Peters, a first-term incumbent that represents the 52nd Congressional District.

“Rep. Scott Peters is a multi-millionaire and the 6th wealthiest member of Congress,” the report states. “Despite the fact that the City of San Diego’s Pension System is billions in debt, Peters took his pension early – and has received over $100,000 since he turned 50.”

The Peters campaign immediately shot back that the Democrat has donated his pension to local charities.

“Mr. DeMaio is well aware that Scott does not keep a penny of his city pension but rather donates it – and then some – right back to the city to fund the public library system,” said Kate Lyon, Peters’ deputy campaign manager, in a Monday morning press release. “Yet in his most recent attack, he failed to reveal this in a shameful attempt to hoodwink the press and deceive the voters.”

DeMaio says the purpose of the report is to “take Pension Reform to the national level – starting with major reforms to the pensions received by Members of Congress.” The GOP candidate is proposing that 1) any government pension be deducted from the regular congressional salary and 2) members of Congress be moved from the lavish Congressional Pension Program to a combination of Social Security and a 401(k) system.

Controversy: McCain excluded, copied from National Journal report

As with all pension reform proposals, the report was accompanied by controversy. One complaint: DeMaio’s report excluded Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain.

“McCain received more than $70,000 in pension benefits from the U.S. Navy in 2012, according to a financial disclosure obtained by National Journal,” the UT San Diego’s Joel Hoffmann reports. “DeMaio left McCain off his similar list of pension-receiving legislators, saying in a footnote that military pensions are excluded.”

Since the report was published, DeMaio apologized to National Journal, a publication for Capitol Hill insiders, after portions of the report were taken without attribution from a 2013 report on congressional pensions.

“[H]is ‘report’ looks like little more than a copied-and-pasted version of a National Journal database that accompanied a cover story last June on congressional double-dipping,” National Journal’s Shane Goldmacher wrote. “National Journal reviewed the financial disclosure forms of every member of the House and Senate to create the database and reveal that nearly one in five members of Congress are collecting taxpayer-funded retirements atop their $174,000 salaries.”

Dave McCulloch, a spokesman for DeMaio’s campaign, said that the candidate has been drawing from publicly available databases and news reports ever since he began fighting for pension reform in 2004.

“As Carl takes his pension-reform efforts national, the campaign expanded his list to include members of Congress, using publicly available data including Member Financial Interest Disclosures and the previous reporting done by National Journal,” McCulloch said.

California Politicians on the Pension Double-Dip List

“In 1978, Howard Jarvis launched the U.S. anti-tax movement in California with Proposition 13, which capped annual increases in property taxes and kept people from being forced from their homes during real-estate bubbles. A generation later, the Golden State could be on the brink of launching another populist movement, one driven by anger over government compensation practices. A key battleground is San Diego. In June, voters will decide on Proposition B, the Comprehensive Pension Reform Initiative. It would end defined-benefit pensions for all new city hires except for police officers, instead providing pensions similar to 401(k)s. It would prevent pay sweeteners from being added to base salary when calculating pensions, and it would require city workers to pay a bigger share of their pension costs. Finally, Prop. B would mandate a five-year salary freeze.”

Ventura County, Phoenix hoping for big changes in benefits

It took longer than I hoped, but it finally seems to be unfolding. Here's CalWatchdog founder Steve Greenhut in his U-T San Diego column:

“Voters approved [DeMaio's] measure with nearly 66 percent of the vote, but … the big vote numbers hid the difficulty of the battle.

“It has been challenged by a union-friendly state agency, the Public Employment Relations Board, which continues to claim that the measure — which instituted a 401(k)-style pension plan for new city hires, capped pensionable city pay for five years and ended pension-spiking abuses — improperly deprived unions of the right to negotiate. That nuisance continues, even if there’s little doubt the constitutional right to vote will ultimately trump the unions’ claims.

“But the courts have three times sided with the city as it continues to implement the measure. And while nothing has been easy here, either, officials in other places are starting to notice that the San Diego approach to reforming pensions might offer the most hope for significantly reining in pension costs without having to go through a legal meat grinder.

“Today, the county of Ventura, which operates an independent retirement system under the state’s County Employees’ Retirement Law of 1937, filed an initiative that closely copies the San Diego blueprint. Earlier this week, Phoenix also filed a similar initiative for the 2014 ballot. Arizona has a different legal framework, but the basic ideas are the same. Officials from both cities met with DeMaio and other reformers in San Diego last November. DeMaio believes that other '37 Act' California counties could follow suit.”

Good luck. As Steve's piece notes, pension reform is incredibly popular — which is why pension status quoists fight so hard to make it incredibly difficult.

And good luck to Carl DeMaio, who is running for Congress against a first-term Democrat in a district that Mitt Romney won in 2012. A McClintock-DeMaio one-two punch in California's GOP congressional delegation sounds pretty amazing to me.

1. Attack Obamacare.

2. Attack Obamacare.

3. Attack Obamacare.

The next year will see millions of Californians griping about either losing their coverage, or putting up with the problems of Obamacare.

Perhaps hundreds of thousands will be forced to declare bankruptcy because either:

a. Their insurance was canceled by Obamacare, and they couldn’t pay the medical bills to stay alive, for example with cancer treatments. Or:

b. They got Obamacare, and continued needed expensive treatments, but their premiums went up so high that they could only afford to pay after declaring bankruptcy.

All these people will be griping to their friends and relatives.

52nd District

Democrats are responding. Take the 52nd Congressional District. Incumbent Scott Peters, D-San Diego, barely defeated Republican Brian Bilbray in 2012, 51.2 percent to 48.8 percent. The likely Republican nominee this time is Carl DeMaio.

This is from Peters’ Website on Nov. 15:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Congressman Scott Peters (CA-52) released the following statement after voting for two separate proposals to enable Americans to keep their current health plans. He voted for the Democratic motion offered by Rep. Andrews of New Jersey, which ultimately did not receive majority support. In addition he joined 38 of his Democratic colleagues in supporting the “Keep Your Health Plan Act of 2013” [HR 3350], introduced by Rep. Upton of Michigan, which passed the House 261-157.

 “Allowing people to keep their current health plans was a commitment the President made to the American people and he did the right thing this week in offering an administrative fix to honor his promise. The ACA is a tremendous undertaking and will likely require more fixes as we continue to work through its implementation. I remain open to every idea, from Republicans and Democrats, to make healthcare more affordable for hard-working San Diegans.

Republicans aren’t letting him get away with that. A Nov. 19 press release from the National Republican Congressional Committee reads:

Nancy Pelosi’s “Meet the Press” Appearance this Weekend Sparks New Round of ObamaCare Questions for House Democrats

WASHINGTON – On this week’s “Meet the Press,” Nancy Pelosi proudly stated that Democrats are going to continue backing ObamaCare and its failed policies. She proclaimed that “Democrats stand tall in support of the Affordable Care Act,” and it’s time for California families to know: does Scott Peters ‘stand tall’ with President Obama and his botched health care law?

Peters has been an ObamaCare supporter through and through, and has repeatedly ensured that the billion dollar health care law remains the law of the land. California families are fed up with their canceled policies, skyrocketing premiums and unaffordable access to health care. It’s time for Scott Peters to fess up — is he going to ‘stand tall’ with the law heading into the 2014 elections?

Similar press releases have been sent out attacking other Democratic incumbents. Obamacare is a target so big even Republicans can hit it.

Since 1948, Democrats have striven to pass comprehensive, national health care. Now that they have done so, they’re going to have to live with it — and lose with it at the polls.