As for the recent health-care bill passed by the Democratically controlled Congress, he thinks it was “a travesty to Democracy.”
Meet U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), soon to be entering his 22nd year in Congress, if he wins the June primary and goes on to November’s 46th District election.
On Monday, the 62-year-old visited Costa Mesa High School seniors inside the school’s theater as part of U.S. government teacher Sandie Soldin’s class.
Maria Mendoza, a senior, stood up and asked Rohrabacher whether he thought more money should go toward helping the poor in the United States instead of trying to defeat terrorists thousands of miles away.
His answer was that Western Civilization still has reason to fear radical Islam, although he ventured that terrorism should be under control in the next five years — something he said he can speak confidently about as a senior member of the House Foreign Relations Committee.
“China is the looming threat your generation will have to deal with,” added Rohrabacher, who, for the record, moved this week from Huntington Beach with his, wife, Rhonda, and their 5-year-old triplets.
“As I like to say, my family now lives in Costa Mesa, and I continue to live on United Airlines,” joked Rohrabacher, who was born in Coronado, grew up in Rancho Palos Verdes and attended Cal State Long Beach and USC before eventually becoming a speech writer for the Reagan administration.
When he decided to run for Congress in 1989, he said close friends at the time told him that he should absolutely not.
“I won by a landslide,” he said. “Don’t ever let your friends talk you out of your goals or setting them high. God smiled on me.”
But not everybody believes Rohrabacher is good for the 46th District, which includes Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach, Garden Grove, Long Beach, Palos Verdes and other points north and south.
