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Tag: Dianne

  • Dianne Feinstein digs in

    Dianne Feinstein digs in

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    “Ro Khanna has no influence on her whatsoever,” said one California Democrat granted anonymity to discuss the senator’s thinking, referring to the first sitting lawmaker who publicly called on her to resign. Feinstein “is not going to respond to pressure.”

    The resolve bubbling up from Feinstein’s orbit adds yet more fuel to the Democratic Party’s combustible situation. The senator has been absent from Congress for nearly two months while dealing with her illness, which means the party can’t move some of President Joe Biden’s nominees through the Judiciary Committee. Aides say they still believe she will return when medically cleared to travel. But Feinstein so far has offered no timeline for when she will be back in Congress, prompting concern among fellow party members that she won’t really return at all.

    But even in illness, the senator is characteristically refusing to buckle. Outside pressure campaigns have done little to move Feinstein in the past — and instead have often backfired.

    She withstood blistering criticism from the gun lobby over the 1994 assault rifle ban; her support for the death penalty (which she later reversed) and ire from the intel community over her 2014 decision to release a report on the CIA’s use of torture after 9/11. Feinstein later enraged liberals when she suggested in a friendly interview early in his term that Donald Trump might evolve into “a good president,” yet she survived the California Democratic Party abandoning her a few months later in 2018 and handily won reelection that year over a progressive challenger. Even as California voters grew far more progressive than the senator who was first elected in 1992, Feinstein’s politics barely budged.

    More recently, she’s dug in when colleagues have questioned her mental acuity. California Democrats are accustomed to what they refer to as the “Feinstein fire drill” — the scramble that takes place after a new set of questions emerge about her health or future.

    Allies insist there is a sharp disconnect between media coverage of her current absence and the views among her supporters back home. Feinstein and many of her aides aren’t even on Twitter, not that the political mobs on the platform would sway them anyway. The slights are shrugged off but not forgotten.

    Generally, her team is intensely protective of her and not particularly forthright about her health. Her statements to the press come slowly, and are often prompted by persistent questions about her whereabouts and condition rather than as an attempt to inform or shape the narrative around her.

    On a personal level, she has long viewed herself as an exacting and effective workhorse for California, pointing to her decades of seniority and relationships to argue that the state would be in far worse hands without her presence in Washington. Just a few months before her shingles diagnosis, she became the longest-serving woman senator.

    But now, she has no personal presence in Washington. And her health could turn worse.

    Feinstein’s critics argue the situation has become untenable given there’s no clear indication on when she’ll return; that a state of nearly 40 million can’t operate with just one senator. But Khanna’s resignation calls have only been echoed by one other lawmaker — Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) — and may have strengthened Feinstein’s support elsewhere.

    Khanna is an early and vocal supporter of California Rep. Barbara Lee, one of the Democrats running to replace Feinstein in 2024. And Lee has privately told associates she disagreed with Khanna’s comments and stressed that the sentiment is not shared by her, according to two people familiar with her conversations. An official with Lee’s campaign declined to comment, pointing to an earlier statement in which they said her primary concern is for Feinstein’s health and that she’s “wishing the senator a full and speedy recovery.”

    Lee has gone out of her way to be deferential to Feinstein, waiting to launch her own campaign until the senator said she wasn’t running for reelection. But Feinstein stepping aside early could be beneficial to Lee, as California Gov. Gavin Newsom has pledged to appoint a Black woman if given the chance.

    “Does anything Ro Khanna said help Barbara Lee for the purposes of securing an appointment?” asked a close Lee ally. “Of course not.”

    Feinstein began exploring whether she could temporarily step down from the Judiciary Committee before the first call to resign, according to a Senate aide familiar with the discussions. And her supporters remain hopeful that her willingness to do so will take some heat off of her. Several Democrats praised the request and said the senator deserves the space to recover.

    But, according to several aides, Senate Republicans will almost certainly gum up the process, which requires bipartisan support. They and others expressed skepticism that party leaders would let Democrats so easily make a move that would allow the Biden administration to approve judges.

    There appears to be no modern precedent for a senator to be temporarily removed from a committee only to return in the same Congress, though there are recent examples of senators leaving committees for health reasons while still remaining a member of the chamber, according to the Senate Historical Office.

    Assuming Republicans block a motion to appoint a replacement by unanimous consent, 60 votes would be needed. Feinstein’s supporters could try to rally votes from some Republicans who have long worked with her, such as Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia or perhaps even Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

    As the political calculations are made, a sadness has set in among many Democrats back home over the fate of the oldest sitting senator. Feinstein’s health complications have mired what should have been a splendid sendoff for a barrier-breaking figure.

    A veteran strategist in the state summarized the mood in a word: “heartbreaking.” Another longtime official assessed the feeling in more blunt terms, offering simply that, “she stayed too long at the fair.”

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Dianne Feinstein’s legacy will be defined by these moments

    Dianne Feinstein’s legacy will be defined by these moments

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    The CIA report

    The assault weapons bill set Feinstein against the NRA. Her quest to uncover intelligence abuses spurred an extraordinarily contentious fight with a less predictable foe: a Democratic administration.

    As chair of the powerful Intelligence Committee, Feinstein was determined to examine the Central Intelligence Agency’s program of detention and interrogation after the Sept. 11 attacks. She pursued the investigation during President Barack Obama’s administration, clashing bitterly with a fellow Democrat over reckoning with America’s wartime conduct. The result: The public can read the bulk of a 700-plus page executive summary cataloguing how the CIA’s torture and detention of terrorism suspects did not produce valuable intelligence and was more brutal than the agency had publicly acknowledged.

    “The major lesson of this report is that regardless of the pressures and the need to act, the Intelligence Community’s actions must always reflect who we are as a nation, and adhere to our laws and standards,” Feinstein wrote in a foreword. Instead, CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values.”

    Initially, CIA director (and fellow Californian) Leon Panetta worked with Feinstein and her staffers by sharing a tranche of documents that Senate staffers pored over inside a secure facility in northern Virginia. After three years of work, they sent a damning report to the White House.

    “I really felt that Senator Feinstein, as chair of the Intelligence oversight committee, understood the responsibility to not only determine what happened but also to determine the lessons from that period in time,” Panetta said in an interview.

    That collaborative spirit evaporated by the time John Brennan became CIA director in 2013. Brennan disputed the report’s conclusions, contradicting an internal agency summary and delaying publication. A larger conflict erupted over access: Brennan’s counsel filed a report with the Department of Justice alleging Senate staffers had accessed CIA documents without authorization; lawmakers accused the CIA of tapping into Senate staff computers.

    It came to a head in March of 2014. Feinstein delivered a Senate floor speech describing how she learned “chilling” and “horrible” details of an “un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation” that entailed “significant CIA wrongdoing.” She demanded the CIA apologize for breaching the computers Senate staff were using, which Brennan ultimately did after an inspector general’s report vindicated Feinstein.

    In the ensuing months, Feinstein would negotiate the fine points of redactions with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, who flew to San Francisco to meet with her. She faced blowback until the very end. Just days before the committee published its executive report, Secretary of State John Kerry lobbied Feinstein to hold off. She did not. Now the report is an indelible part of her record and a primary document of the country’s history.

    “I think it was Dianne’s hope that, if she persisted and she presented what happened, that although it would be difficult, although it would offend a lot of people in the process, that nevertheless she would serve the national interest,” Panetta said. “She knew what needed to be done, and she was experienced enough to know how the bureaucracy can be a barrier to finding the truth.”

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Dianne Feinstein’s extremely awkward, very uncomfortable exit from the political stage

    Dianne Feinstein’s extremely awkward, very uncomfortable exit from the political stage

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    Feinstein, the longest-serving Democrat in the Senate, is in the midst of one of the most uneasy codas to a political career. Her extended pre-departure has, for many of her fellow Democrats, turned into an abject lesson in the perils of hanging on.

    “She’s still the state’s senior senator,” said one longtime Democratic strategist in California. “And they’re dancing on her [political] grave.”

    The oldest member of Congress at 89, Feinstein has for decades been a fixture in Democratic politics here. But as the electorate in California shifted, her brand of centrism fell out of step with her party’s progressive base — so much so that the California Democratic Party in the 2018 primary declined to endorse her reelection bid. She ran and won handily anyway.

    More problematic for Feinstein has been the persistent questions about her health. Even Democrats sympathetic to the senator have been reading headlines about her cognitive fitness to serve. The stories about it pop up with such regularity now that they no longer elicit the shock value of the early versions, when publication of such matters seemed to be violating some unwritten code of D.C. conduct.

    Feinstein’s office has long batted down such talk, saying she has her full facilities and remains utterly capable of executing the job of senator to the nation’s most populous state. Still, it’s a long way from the days of Harvey Milk or the “year of the woman” when she and Barbara Boxer became the first women elected to the Senate from California in 1992. Heck, it’s a long way from 2019, when Annette Bening was portraying her as an anti-torture, Bush administration-fighting crusader in the political drama “The Report.”

    In California, Democrats are left looking for signs that she, too, sees that the show is coming to a close. That includes even those supporting her.

    After Feinstein this week reported raising less than $600 in the last fundraising period, one of her small-dollar donors, a Carlsbad, Calif., man named William Betts, said, “I have some automatic payments in there that are still ongoing.”

    “I would much prefer a younger candidate, certainly anybody from Gen X,” he said. “My preference is that she retires.”

    Much of California would appear to be ready for that. In a Berkeley IGS Poll taken about a year ago, Feinstein’s job approval rating in the state hit an all-time low of 30 percent. An October measure by the Public Policy Institute of California put her approval rating higher, at 41 percent among likely voters, but still underwater.

    “There hasn’t been much that’s been said in terms of her recent leadership that’s been positive,” said Mark Baldassare, director of the poll. “It really has been a while since I’ve read or heard glowing remarks about her.”

    Still, he said that if he was polling on the Senate race now, he would include her.

    “Until further notice,” he said, “she’s the senator.”

    But almost everyone else in California, it seems — some more gently than others — is preparing for her not to be. Pelosi, before issuing her conditional endorsement of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), said that if Feinstein does seek reelection, “she has my whole-hearted support.” But no politician puts out that kind of statement if they expect her to. Schiff and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) are already running. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), has told her colleagues she plans to. Rep Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) is giving consideration to the race.

    The already declared candidacies, in turn, have ignited a scramble among eager Democrats downstream from them to announce campaigns for their soon-to-be-open House seats.

    “It seems like all of them are handling it professionally, and honoring Dianne,” said Bob Mulholland, a veteran Democratic strategist and former Democratic National Committee member.

    Even if the rush to fill a chair that Feinstein still occupies is, collectively, “pretty tasteless,” as one Democratic strategist described it, it may be hard to fault politically. The California primary will be in March of 2024 — just more than a year away — and candidates will need to raise tens of millions of dollars to compete in the state’s enormous media markets.

    “What’s sad about this is that she’s always been somebody you didn’t dare mess around with,” the strategist said. “And it looks like that’s just gone.”

    Already, Schiff is raising money and Porter, with her whiteboards out, is bringing in cash too. At her first campaign event, in Northern California last month, she told the crowd it’s time for “a fresh new voice” in the Senate.

    For her part, Feinstein has hardly batted an eye at the spectacle surrounding her, even if the pre-announcement announcements run counter to what Boxer adviser Rose Kapolczynski called “a long tradition of deference.”

    “The senator has said on a few occasions the more the merrier,” a Feinstein spokesperson said. Of Feinstein’s own timeline, she told Bloomberg News that she’ll announce plans “in the spring sometime.”

    “Not in the winter,” Feinstein said. “I don’t announce in the winter.”

    If she does announce her retirement, it may dramatically shift the opinion her constituents have of her. Politicians are often more popular when they go.

    “There will be all the usual retrospectives about her career and her groundbreaking moments, and gun control and abortion and Harvey Milk and all of that,” Kapolczynski said. “There’ll be an afterglow. Once you announce you’re not running again, you get an afterglow from the voters.”

    That will likely come no matter when Feinstein makes her announcement. And after 30 years in the Senate, some Democrats say, she has clearly earned the right to make her plans on whatever timeline she likes.

    “I think she’s been a great senator, but you know … the writing’s been on the wall all for a while,” said Steve Maviglio, a former New Hampshire state lawmaker and Democratic strategist in California. “I think she wants to bow out on her terms.”

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )