Congressman Jimmy Gómez (Aurelia Ventura/La Opinion)
Photo: Aurelia Ventura / Impremedia / La Opinion
For the elections in the 34th district of the federal Congress in California, three are running: the incumbent Jimmy Gómez and David Kim, both Democrats, and Clifton Rio Torrado VonBuck, a Republican and owner of a small business, about whom no further information is known. The district is traditionally Democratic: last year Joe Biden received more than 80% of the vote there.
David Kim is a board member of the Macarthur Park Neighborhood Council and ran against Gomez in 2020 as well, but hasn’t had a chance to build up experience and be an agent of change.
District 34 is located within Los Angeles and includes Downtown, Koreatown, and much of the east side of the city.
The primary elections are on June 7 and the general ones, on November 8.
We believe that Jimmy Gómez has done a good job representing the community in general; we appreciate the numerous bills he authored, as well as his plans for the next legislative period. We urge our readers to support his candidacy.
In 2017, when Xavier Becerra, who represented the district, was appointed California Attorney General, Gómez prevailed in a special election to replace him, winning re-election the following year with 72% of the vote. He previously served for 30 years in that district Ed Royball, California’s first Latino congressman.
Jimmy Gómez, now 47, is the youngest of six children of Mexican immigrants – a farmworker and later a cook and an employee at a nursing home – who were undocumented until shortly after his birth. His father was a former bracero and died in 2005. Gómez has a BA in political science from UCLA and a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Today Jimmy Gomez lives in Eagle Rock with his wife Mary Hodge.
Before taking office as a congressman, he was a member of the California Legislative Assembly, a position to which he was elected in 2012. Re-elected in 2014 with 83% of the vote, he served as Majority Leader from 2013 to 2014 and as chairman of the powerful Committee of assignments,
Previously, as a union activist, he was the political director of the United California Nurses Association, and also an aide to then-Congresswoman Hilda Solis.
Gomez considers himself an organizer of working families and a progressive champion “who fights for workers’ rights, immigrant rights, women’s health, housing and health care for all,” he says in response to questions by writing of The Opinion. .
In Congress, it has sponsored or co-sponsored numerous motions and proclamations that are in various stages of approval: 19 in the last year.
Some of them are already law. It especially highlights that “President Biden signed into law my Student Loan Tax Relief Act, which provides millions in tax benefits to borrowers who have had their student loans forgiven.” He also emphasizes that “I am one of the original cosponsors of the Citizenship Act, the president’s plan to reform the immigration system.”
He is a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, among other assignments, from where, he tells us, he secured $28 million in new federal funding for the Los Angeles River project.
If re-elected, Jimmy Gómez will continue to develop as a leader for the entire population and not just as a Latino representative.
Due to the intensity of his work, his accumulated experience, his progressive and consistent positions, we call on our readers to vote for Jimmy Gómez for Congress on June 7!
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