Our friend Matt Cunningham has a post over at the Red County/OC Blog on how Irvine City Council member Christina Shea seems to have abandoned her conservative principles to embrace campaign finance reform and the new anti-lobbying portion of the Irvine Ethics ordinance.
Matt quotes Shea’s newsletter, the one she started by getting the email addresses of city residents in spite of the city’s privacy policy, and suggests Ms. Shea is on the wrong path. Matt writes:
Huh? I thought the point of electing a conservative majority to the Irvine City Council was to have a…conservative majority. And there’s nothing conservative about “tightening campaign finance rules,” i.e. making government regulation of political speech more intrusive and burdensome. ÂÂ
I would gently suggest Councilwoman Shea re-think her position in light of the principles of liberty this country was founded on.
There is no shortage, on the Irvine City Council or elsewhere, of politicians who subscribe to the baseless nostrum that with enough government regulations and controls, then politics can be rendered “clean.” We don’t need one more.
Shea’s newsletter promotes her pro-yes on Measure H vote as a good start and wishes the entire ethics ordinance was on the ballot. She forgot to tell voters she voted against the ethics ordinance twice and offer an alternative proposal of the entiure ethics ordinance with the lobbyist reference excluded so Shea wouldn’t feel forced to resign, as she suggested in her November 2005 memo to the city council and city manager.
It seems after eight years of exceptional results by progressives in governing the city that Christina Shea has reached the conclusion that to win in Irvine, you need to run for office from the left side of the aisle.
But still, on this day of days, when Gay Marriage is finally legal in California, can a woman who once said, “I’m a mom. I don’t want Gay Pride parades in my city or anonymous sex in bathrooms” really change her stripes all that much? I don’t think she has to worry about the public bathrooms in Irvine unless Senator Larry Craig comes to town to endorse her.