It’s only been a couple days, with a whole bunch more to go before the November 2018 election, and the UC Irvine School of Law vote has already been split when it comes to the 45th U.S. Congressional District seat held by Mimi Walters (R-Irvine).
That is because Associate Professor David Min has tossed his beanie into the ring, just as another colleague AND Democrat, Katie Porter, did days before.
Indeed, Min sees Porter’s high-profile backing from U.S. senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Kamala Harris (D-California) and raises her Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), who Min used to advise.
Sure, that’s two senators for Porter and one for Min, but keep in mind that he now has a greater opportunity to have a campaign event headlined by ol’ Chuckie’s niece Amy Schumer. Just pray she can get through an appearance without any stolen jokes.
Speaking of trainwrecks, Min also has the backing of former Irvine Mayor Sukhee King and ex-Councilwoman Mary Ann Guido, but we will try not to hold the candidate’s ties to Larry Agran sycophants against him.
Min and Porter mine the same fields when it comes to the law. Porter specializes in consumer law, most especially as it applies to fraud by the mortgage industry. Min’s expertise is in business law, credit cards, economics and law, finance, government regulation and policy, mortgages, real estate law, banking and securities regulation.
“David Min is a nationally recognized expert on financial markets regulation, and his research interests focus on the law and policy of banking, real estate finance and capital markets,” reads his UCI bio.
Before coming to UCI, Porter served with the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and while at the Irvine campus she was tapped by then-California Attorney General Harris to oversee an $18 billion mortgage settlement with banks.
Pre-UCI, Min was a staff attorney at the Securities and Exchange Commission, as an associate in the Securities Litigation practice group of the D.C. law firm WilmerHale and most recently the associate director for Financial Markets Policy at the Center for American Progress, a policy think tank, where he oversaw the efforts of the Mortgage Finance Working Group
Jeez, you two kids, get a room!
Both seek to un-seat Walters, the veteran Orange County politician who won her first trip to Washington in 2014 with more than 65 percent of the vote against the Democrat. She got 58.6 percent of the vote in her reelection bid last November, but Democrats are heartened because in that same election, in that same 45th district, Hillary Clinton got more votes than Donald Trump did for president.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.