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California Today: Lawmakers With Little in Common, Except a Name

posted onFebruary 21, 2017

Article snippet: Good morning. (Want to get California Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.) Let’s turn it over to Thomas Fuller, our San Francisco bureau chief, for today’s introduction. They look nothing like each other and their policies could hardly be more different. But it’s not surprising that Kevin McCarthy, Republican congressman from Bakersfield, and Kevin McCarty, Democratic State Assembly member from Sacramento, sometimes get mixed up. Mail goes to the wrong office. Public introductions get flubbed. Emphatic comments on social media are misdirected. “We’ve been confused for more than a decade,” Mr. McCarty, who calls himself a California progressive, said in a recent interview. He’s an advocate of gun control and an environmentalist, and he recently proposed more support for refugees. His near namesake, Representative McCarthy, is against abortion and a strong supporter of the oil and gas industry who often receives online tongue-lashings from the Sierra Club. The confusion has been compounded with Mr. McCarthy’s rise to national prominence as House majority leader, a position he took up in 2014. [Related coverage: Kevin McCarthy tells California that poking the president could hurt you.] “His politics are night and day from mine,” Mr. McCarty said. “What can you do? It gives us a collective chuckle.” On social media, things get even more complicated. A spokesman for the majority leader says the most frequent confusion is not with the assemblyman but with a film critic... Link to the full article to read more

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