Dianne Feinstein To Head Up Democratic Effort To Stop Trump's Court Pick: She's "Lucid Sometimes"

 

Does Nana forget directions-- the way The Donald does?

FDR moved into the White House for the first time a couple of months before Dianne Feinstein was born. When she graduated from Convent of the Sacred Heart High School, Truman was president. Feinstein was first elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1969, long before I moved there. I was living in Afghanistan was she was elected and never heard of her. Two years later she ran against Mayor Joseph Alioto from the right and lost with 21.8% of the vote. Four years later, with Alioto retiring, she ran for mayor as the conservative again, and again came in third, this time with 18.7% of the vote. San Francisco voters had gotten to know what a piece of crap she was. And then George Moscone, the mayor (along with Harvey Milk) was assassinated by a Feinstein ally and, as head of the board of supervisors she assumed the mayoralty and was able to run as an incumbent. Her top challenger-- Quentin Kopp-- was even further right than she was. I was a San Francisco resident at the time and the most plausible progressive in the race was Dead Kennedys' lead singer Jello Biafra, who I actively supported. He came in 3rd in a 9-way race.

I'm old. She's older, much older. In fact, she's the oldest member of the Senate. That doesn't matter. What does matter is that she's senile. California voters were out of their collective mind to reelect her in 2018. But in a race without a Republican that pitted her-- still a rotgut conservative-- against a progressive, Kevin de León, Republicans and conservative independents backed her and she won 5,976,440 (54.2%) to 5,047,268 (45.8%), her worst performance since 1994 when oil billionaire Michael Huffington spent a fortune against her.

No one in DC likes talking about senile members of Congress-- and there are plenty; we're looking at you, Pat Roberts (who at least has the good grace to be calling it quits now) and you Jim Inhofe, the snowball climate change denier from Oklahoma, Don Young, a month older than Feinstein and supposedly the first American-- as a trapper --to ever set foot in then Russian-Alaska. But yesterday John Bresnahan and Marianne Levine put a toe over the line: Democrats worry Feinstein can't handle Supreme Court battle. Her colleagues are saying someone sharper needs to head the Judiciary Committee effort on behalf of the Democrats. No shit!

Bresnahan and Levine tiptoe around the senility question, using claptrap like she's "widely respected by senators in both parties, but she has noticeably slowed in recent years." They leave it for readers to figure out what this means: "Interviews with more than a dozen Democratic senators and aides show widespread concern over whether the California Democrat is capable of leading the aggressive effort Democrats need against whoever [The Donald] picks to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg... Some Democrats privately fear that Feinstein could mishandle the situation and hurt their chances of winning back the majority."

Feinstein sometimes gets confused by reporters’ questions, or will offer different answers to the same question depending on where or when she’s asked. Her appearance is frail. And Feinstein's genteel demeanor, which seems like it belongs to a bygone Senate era, can lead to trouble with an increasingly hard-line Democratic base uninterested in collegiality or bipartisan platitudes.

...Feinstein relies heavily on her ever-present staff to deal with any issues, frequently turning to them for help in responding to inquiries. Feinstein had to be coaxed into wearing a mask around the Senate during the early days of the pandemic, despite being part of the most vulnerable age groups for the disease. She’s only made two floor speeches in the last nine months, her last being in early July, although she remains active in committee hearings.

And then there’s the lingering fallout over Feinstein’s role in the hugely controversial Judiciary Committee hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, an issue that factors deeply into the questions about her suitability for this latest nomination fight.

Feinstein waited for several weeks before disclosing allegations by Christine Blasey Ford that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers. The bombshell accusations nearly sank Kavanaugh’s nomination, and senators in both parties questioned why Feinstein didn’t move more quickly to disclose Blasey Ford’s statement.

A Democratic senator, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said a group of Feinstein’s colleagues want Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) or Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) to serve as the top Democrat on the Judiciary panel for the upcoming nomination hearings, which are expected to be extraordinarily contentious. This senator is worried that potential missteps by Feinstein could cost Democrats seats.

“She’s not sure what she’s doing,” the Democratic senator said of Feinstein. “If you take a look at Kavanaugh, we may be short two senators because of that. And if this gets [messed] up, it may be the same result.”

I couldn't find anyone to talk on the record and no one even felt discussing this with me at all. One Senate staffer said she's "lucid sometimes... [and] confused sometimes." He said it could "easily turn into a disaster with her" leading the attack... She's the wrong person for the job, mentally impaired or not." He also told me the chance of Schumer removing her " is exactly zero." Democrats play nice-- they don't play for keeps-- except, of course, when they're eviscerating progressives.