Democrats rule Sacramento but its most interesting politician is Republican | Opinion
Rocklin’s Kevin Kiley is having his moment in the sun, mainly because he is still showing up to work at Capitol Hill while many of his fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives are not. This is due to Speaker Mike Johnson’s weeks-long refusal to return the House to session.
Because Kiley has been so willing to show daylight between his views on numerous issues and those of his Speaker, and because the Washington media corps is undoubtedly desperate to find a Republican still in town who is willing to speak, the second-term Congressman from Placer County is making most of a historic federal government shutdown.
“I’m just fulfilling the promises that I made when I ran, which is that I’ll be an independent voice,” Kiley said in a recent interview.
The Congressman has been a polarizing figure in Sacramento regional politics, where he has been traditionally aligned with conservative groups concerned with transgender students and known for bashing Democrats for just about everything, from high speed rail to the state’s ongoing homeless problems.
“In the progressive utopia of California,” Kiley said in 2022, “you walk down streets that double as restrooms and injection sites.”
A congressman in limbo
Yet now back home, the 40-year-old Kiley finds himself in political limbo. His district is now redrawn toward Sacramento and away from Republican country on the east side of the Sierra thanks to Tuesday’s passage of Proposition 50 and its gerrymandered maps that favor Democrats and not him.
Kiley is undecided where he will run for re-election. And in his new political predicament thanks to Prop. 50, it is difficult to view his current actions without questioning his strategic intentions, given his tenuous hold on a congressional seat.
It wasn’t that long ago that Kiley appeared squarely inside the Republican establishment in Congress. He supported, for example, the president’s Big Beautiful Bill and its tax cuts disproportionately for the wealthy and the budget cuts that disproportionately impact lower-income Americans.
But then the Speaker went along with the president’s plans to gerrymander more Republican-leaning congressional seats in Texas in hopes of keeping Washington in Republican hands. And then California Gov. Gavin Newsom decided to “fight fire with fire” by backing Prop. 50.
All this made Kiley and California Republicans endangered species back in Congress, the party’s sacrificial lambs as part of that bigger plan to keep the House in GOP hands.
Whether it’s his intention or not, Kiley is making Congress look bad by repeatedly going on television saying that the House should still be doing the people’s business, and offering multiple positions that are downright centrist.
Kiley is, for example, in favor of fair national elections for congressional seats, where a new federal law would forbid any to be drawn with partisan politics in mind. “Let’s bar it from happening,” he said.
He is in favor of Americans who qualify for food benefits via the federal SNAP program to receive those benefits despite the shutdown. “We need to get people benefits in any way that we can,” he said.
A health care compromise
And on Monday, he and Democratic Congressman Sam Liccardo of San Jose unveiled their compromise on how to end the government shutdown.
Their “Fix It Act” would extend these subsidies (in the form of tax credits) another two years, a priority of the Democrats. For Republicans, the act would implement new surveillance efforts to eliminate non-qualifying beneficiaries from the program while cutting the costs of third-party brokers.
Johnson has refused to consider such compromises until Democrats would put enough votes to end the shutdown. Kiley is political light years ahead of him. “Having those conversations,” he said, “could provide a pathway out of the shutdown.”
Kiley’s moment in this temporary Washington spotlight may soon be coming to an end, if the House of Representatives and the president go along with Sunday’s vote in the U.S. Senate. Johnson would be back in the saddle, and Kiley presumably in his doghouse.
Kiley fears that California’s embrace of gerrymandering “may not end up being temporary unless we come up with a national solution.” If true, he and all of us are in a new political world for as far as the eye can see, with all kinds of changes to unfold. The not-so-mysterious evolution of Kevin Kiley, abandoned by his own Speaker, may merely be the beginning.
This story was originally published November 10, 2025 at 1:23 PM.