Democracy is on the ballot in Placer County race for Congress. Here’s the right choice

State Assemblyman Kevin Kiley emerged victorious from the region’s marquee Republican showdown in the spring, but at what price? The would-be congressman from Placer County beat fellow GOP candidate Scott Jones, the Sacramento County sheriff, with the support of former President Donald Trump, who beyond being under multiple criminal investigations is America’s most prominent opponent of democracy itself. Kiley’s Trump endorsement is, to say the least, a strange credential for a man asking people to vote for him, let alone trust him, with elected office.

Fortunately, the region’s voters have another option, and a better one, to succeed Tom McClintock, their longtime nonresident representative: Dr. Kermit Jones, a former Navy flight surgeon and Iraq veteran with thoughtful proposals on health care, wildfire resilience and more.

Encompassing Placer County and portions of Sacramento, El Dorado and Yuba counties, the sprawling new 3rd Congressional District also stretches through much of the Eastern Sierra Nevada. After redistricting, McClintock, who lives in Elk Grove but represents much of the district, fled for the redder pastures of the San Joaquin Valley’s 5th. While the new 3rd also tilts Republican, its voters favored Trump by less than two percentage points.

Raised on a small farm in the Midwest, Dr. Jones joined the Navy after 9/11 and was deployed twice to Iraq with a Marine helicopter squadron based at Camp Pendleton, which was his introduction to California. A lawyer and practicing family physician, he acquired a deeper understanding of the health care system through the difficult experience of helping his mother through lung cancer treatment.

“I had to navigate the health care system for her,” Jones said of his mother, who died in August. He added that she was able to live as long as she did partly because her son is a doctor who could advocate for her, and “that’s not the way our health care system is supposed to work.”

Jones has a detailed plan to improve the system by decreasing care costs; increasing access to care for pregnant women, veterans and rural residents; adding a public insurance option; and investing in public health, mental health and drug treatment.

He also advocates a federal fire insurance program as one means of grappling with climate change in a way that crosses the usual partisan divides.

Kiley, whose run for Congress came fresh off his fomenting of a wasteful attempt to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom a year before this election, has a considerably less constructive platform. This summer, he joined the lineup of reactionary extremists appearing at the Conservative Political Action Conference to disparage his own state as an excrement-strewn hellscape and suggest the drought isn’t real because we still have oceans.

Kiley’s calculation appears to be that he need only pander to the irrational right to win a Republican-leaning district. But Jones, who calls himself “a different type of Democrat,” said the district’s partisan preference shouldn’t be taken for granted. He noted that it includes “a lot of Republicans and independents who voted for Biden; they didn’t just check the box for Trump. ... And when I was out there talking to some of these people, they didn’t believe in the big lie — they did not believe that Trump won the election.”

That’s more than can necessarily be said for his opponent. Kiley, who for obvious reasons would not take questions from The Bee’s Editorial Board, has refused to acknowledge that President Joe Biden was legitimately elected, which is an unsettling reminder that this is no ordinary midterm. A direct line can be drawn between the Republican candidates’ refusal to answer questions or recognize facts and their party’s willingness to subvert democracy. Voters who grant them that power risk losing their own.

This story was originally published September 14, 2022 at 5:00 AM.