“Dianne will get better. She will come back to work. And she’s already told Senator Schumer … that he can replace her on the judiciary committee if it’s urgent for these hearings for judges,” Gillibrand said, referencing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“She’s a team player, and she’s an extraordinary member of the Senate,” Gillibrand said. “It’s her right. She’s been voted by her state to be senator for six years. She has the right, in my opinion, to decide when she steps down.”
Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) also praised Feinstein’s decision to step down from the committee and supported her decision to remain in the Senate.
“I wish her well. I hope she returns to the Senate very soon,” Baldwin said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
And Feinstein’s colleagues should “take her at her word,” that she intends to return to the office, Klobuchar said.
“I think she made the right decision to step off the Judiciary Committee. I serve on that committee, and we cannot advance judges or legislation with a missing person because of the close vote,” Klobuchar said on ABC’s “This Week.”
But if her absence continues for an extended length, “then she’s going to have to make a decision with her family and her friends about what her future holds,” Klobuchar said. “Because this isn’t just about California, it’s also about the nation. And we just can’t — with this one vote margin — and expect every other person to be there every single time.”
Democrats will need Feinstein’s vote, Klobuchar said, especially as Congress readies itself for a debt-ceiling standoff.
Feinstein, who was first elected in 1992, has already said she will not seek another term in 2024.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) called for Feinstein to step down last week, as Senate Democrats face an ongoing struggle to confirm President Joe Biden’s judicial picks without her vote.
Khanna doubled down on his call for Feinstein to step down immediately during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
“Only in Washington would you get criticized for saying something so obvious,” he said to host Shannon Bream. “I have a lot of respect for Senator Feinstein, but she’s missed 75 percent of votes at this year. She has not been showing up and she has no intention. We don’t know if she’s even going to show up. She has no return date.”
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No Republicans have spoken out so far about Feinstein’s request for a temporary replacement on the Judiciary Committee, where her absence has hobbled Democrats’ ability to confirm President Joe Biden’s judicial picks. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office also offered no word on the matter Wednesday night.
But the GOP has plenty of members eager to continue blocking those Biden nominees, so it’s unclear how willing they’ll be to help Democrats solve their Feinstein problem.
The senior California senator also sits on the Senate Intelligence, Appropriations and Rules Committees, though she limited her request for a short-term replacement to her seat on Judiciary.
In his statement acknowledging Feinstein’s now-murky path to returning to the Senate, Judiciary panel chief Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-Ill.) spokesperson didn’t acknowledge her request to be replaced.
“Sen. Durbin wishes Sen. Feinstein well as she continues to recover. And he looks forward to continuing the important work of moving judicial nominees through the Committee when the Senate reconvenes,” said Emily Hampsten.
Meanwhile, some House Democrats are starting to say the quiet part out loud — calling on Feinstein to resign after POLITICO reported on Wednesday that people who have visited with Feinstein in recent weeks or been briefed on her status say her shingles diagnosis appears to have taken a heavy toll.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who serves as co-chair of Rep. Barbara Lee’s (D-Calif.) 2024 Senate campaign to replace Feinstein, said the current California senator should resign because “it is obvious she can no longer fulfill her duties.”
And quote-tweeting Khanna,Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) agreed, calling it a “dereliction of duty” for Feinstein “to remain in the Senate and a dereliction of duty for those who agree to remain quiet.”
Yet some female lawmakers, including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), are urging the party to give Feinstein space to end her long career on her terms.
Rep. Norma Torres (D-Calif.) tweeted a wish for Feinstein to get well soon and added: “When women age or get sick, the men are quick to push them aside. When men age or get sick, they get a promotion.”
Separately, Pelosi told reporters, “She deserves the respect to get well and be back on duty and it’s interesting to me, I don’t know what political agendas are at work, that are going after Sen. Feinstein in that way.”
Feinstein confidants underscored that they are still hopeful she could serve out the nearly two years that remain in her term. But neither of those two people, who addressed the sensitive matter on condition of anonymity, indicated they were confident she would be able to do so from Washington.
And Democrats may soon face another problem with their senior California senator: Regardless of whether she’s replaced on the Judiciary panel, her absence from the floor leaves them in a tough spot with a 51-49 majority.
Ryan Lizza contributed to this report.
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Three people who have visited with the senator in recent weeks or been briefed on her status say her diagnosis appears to have taken a heavy toll on her. Other confidants, including two who have seen or spoken with the senator, underscored that they are still hopeful she could serve out the nearly two years that remain in her term. But neither of those people, who addressed the sensitive matter on condition of anonymity, indicated they were confident she would be able to do so from Washington.
Indeed, aides and confidants are currently offering up no firm timeframe for her return to a chamber where Democrats are sorely missing her vote. And Feinstein’s own spokesperson Adam Russell said that there was no update on her expected date to return to Washington, though at least one associate to the senator said she’s “making good progress in her recovery.”
Feinstein’s absence has already forced her party to change how they run the Senate, where Democrats can’t move President Joe Biden’s judicial picks without her vote. And in California, the emerging race to succeed Feinstein is in a holding pattern of its own thanks to the uncertainty about her future — and persistent chatter about whether Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom might be forced to disrupt the contest by appointing her successor.
The senator, an iconic presence in the party who passed up its top spot on the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020 amid speculation about her mental acuity, has kept word of her condition hush-hush. Her staff has been reticent to talk about her health even with other members of the California delegation, according to six Democrats familiar with the conversations.
It’s a delicate dynamic, one made even tougher by Senate Democrats’ 51-vote majority. And speculation about Feinstein’s future ratcheted higher after the recent departure of her chief of staff, David Grannis, who left for a new role at the Commission on the National Defense Strategy. James Sauls, a longtime aide on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has stepped into the chief of staff role, according to Russell.
While her illness has kept Feinstein from voting in the Judiciary panel to approve Biden’s nominees for the federal bench, effectively stalling those confirmations for now, it’s also being felt on the Senate floor. The California Democrat has missed nearly 60 votes since her shingles diagnosis in mid-February.
That lengthy absence has strained Democrats’ 51-49 majority in the chamber, with Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) also absent for weeks while in treatment for depression.
Vice President Kamala Harris has broken several ties to confirm judicial nominees on the floor, but committee action has been postponed on multiple nominations in her absence. There are currently 14 pending judicial nominees who have had hearings but have not gotten a vote in committee.
“I’m anxious, because I can’t really have a markup of new judge nominees until she’s there,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the party’s No. 2 and the Senate Judiciary Committee chair told POLITICO late last month.
Durbin took the top Democratic spot on the panel in late 2020 after Feinstein ceded it following a firestorm of liberal fury with her cordial treatment of the GOP — and then-Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
Since then, pressure has mounted on Feinstein from some fellow Democrats to end her storied career on her own terms. Just this week, liberals began reupping their nudges for her to step aside; Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) retweeted a post appearing to call for Feinstein to retire, though it’s not clear whether the move amounted to an endorsement of that stance. And on Wednesday, shortly after this item was posted, Rep. Ro Khanna of California, did the same.
The longest-serving woman in Senate history eventually said in February she would not seek another term but vowed to complete her current one.
Days after that announcement, the shingles sidelined Feinstein.
The race to replace the trailblazing California political giant is already crowded, with House Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee battling for the seat that hasn’t been vacant in more than 30 years. Complicating their emerging rivalry is Newsom’s 2021 commitment to nominating a Black woman for the Senate should Feinstein resign.
If he sticks to that promise, it would put a finger on the scale for Lee — who, if appointed to serve out the rest of Feinstein’s term, could run for a full term next year with the advantage of incumbency.
California is one of the 36 states that allow the governor to appoint a senator to hold the seat until the next regularly scheduled statewide election. However, should an appointment happen too close to March 2024, experts said the Senate election could not be consolidated with the primary.
Nicholas Wu, Sarah Ferris and Daniella Diaz contributed to this report.
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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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In fact, most of the anticipated dominoes had already fallen before Feinstein played her last piece. Feinstein’s retirement had been so widely expected that California Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Katie Porter were already running to succeed her. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), had told her colleagues and supporters she planned to run, while former Speaker Nancy Pelosi had publicly endorsed Schiff based on the expectation Feinstein would retire.
What Feinstein’s Tuesday announcement did do was eliminate the conditional nature of that endorsement. It also allowed candidates and their supporters to quit the awkward dance. And “if there was any [hesitation] on the throttle, for any of the campaigns, it’s gone,” said Doug Herman, a Southern California-based Democratic strategist.
Any misgivings over pushing out the longest-serving woman senator seemed mostly nonexistent, anyway. Her official retirement won’t do much to fundamentally alter the dynamics of the campaign.
“Not a lick,” Herman said. “Look, Schiff and Porter had kickoff rallies already. If there’s anything they’re holding back, tell me where. Nobody expected that she was running, anyway.”
In her retirement announcement, Feinstein asserted that she will serve out her full term, preventing another appointment courtesy of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. He had vowed to select a Black woman if he got another chance, after picking Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) to fill then-Sen. Kamala Harris’ seat. The expectation within Democratic circles is he would have chosen Lee.
If Feinstein holds to her timeline, it will guarantee the kind of open race that ambitious California Democrats have eagerly awaited.
The field may still expand. California has no shortage of Democrats in statewide elected office, plus members of Congress and independently wealthy Democrats who could self-fund a campaign. Lee, in a statement praising Feinstein’s “historic Senate career,” said, “While I hope we will keep the focus in these coming days on celebrating the Senator and her historic tenure in the Senate, I know there are questions about the Senate race in 2024, which I will address soon.”
Each candidate — and Lee, who is expected to formally announce in the coming days — has dealt with the unease around Feinstein differently.
Porter, the youngest of the group and new to Congress by comparison, did express some initial hesitation about leaping into the race with Feinstein’s retirement still unclear. Some Porter supporters worried that it could appear like she was trampling on the long sendoff of a woman who many in the state regard as an icon.
But Porter, who hemorrhaged cash to retain her purple Orange County congressional seat, ultimately pushed through with the earliest launch. There was little in the way of backlash within the party. In fact, the outrage from most of the rival camps related to the announcement occurring just as disastrous storms were hitting California.
Schiff, who is widely expected to win Feinstein’s support for her seat, was far more calculating in his approach — initially taking care to defer to the senator’s eventual retirement decision. But he wasn’t willing to wait completely, unwilling to cede a state of 40 million people for weeks on end to a rival for no good reason. Then the endorsement of Pelosi represented a major coup, especially in a race thus far populated by two Southern Californians who are fighting for Bay Area inroads.
Lee’s whole game — at least for months — was hoping to win Newsom’s appointment if Feinstein stepped down early. Colleagues and aides to the California Democrat have shared uncomfortable stories about Feinstein’s ability to continue the job, including an instance over two years ago when she stepped aside from the top spot on the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee.
Absent an appointment, Lee would have an uphill climb. Her lack of resources as she enters the race all but assures that she would have to rely on a torrent of outside spending to boost her — advisers and analysts expect the low-end down-payment for TV advertising heading into next year’s competitive primary would be $25 million to $30 million.
Ultimately, Feinstein’s endorsement may not be as valuable as that of sitting senators in some other states. Her approval rating had fallen underwater in California as her moderate politics fell out of step with the state’s activist base. For a Democrat courting moderates or older Democrats, said Rose Kapolczynski, a Democratic strategist, Feinstein’s endorsement may be beneficial, though not determinative in California.
“In most campaigns for an open seat, everyone wants the endorsement of the retiring incumbent, but that’s not the case here,” said Kapolczynski, who helped guide former Sen. Barbara Boxer’s political career. “Feinstein now is more moderate than the Democratic primary electorate, so her endorsement is not as sought after as you might imagine the incumbent’s endorsement would be.”
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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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