Became a joke.....

Don't let Democrats rewrite Dianne Feinstein's infuriating final chapter

Column: SFGATE politics editor Alex Shultz writes on how prominent Democrats obfuscated — and are still obfuscating — the charade that was Feinstein’s last Senate term

By Alex Shultz

On Sept. 29, Dianne Feinstein, 90, died of natural causes. She had cast a vote in the Senate less than a day prior.

Feinstein’s death came after months of declining mental and physical health, and years of speculation about her fitness to serve. And yet, her death was described as a “complete shock” by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is among the many prominent Democrats now attempting to recast Feinstein’s final years in public service as heroic, rather than a damning symbol of a broken system.

There’s nothing more American than lionizing the act of clocking in until the bitter end. Rep. Maxine Waters, for instance, told the San Francisco Chronicle that people “might want to think twice” about suggesting Feinstein should have long ago stepped down. “I love her courage, and I love the fact that she didn’t let anybody push her out,” Waters said. “She decided when she was going to leave, and she left in death.” (SFGATE and the San Francisco Chronicle are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms.)

Rep. Nancy Pelosi similarly valorized Feinstein in an op-ed, writing, “Last week, Dianne left us on her own terms: still at work, after confirming 144 of President Joe Biden’s judges. It is fitting that she spent her final day on Earth on the Senate floor, to cast her final vote to advance legislation to keep the government open for the people.”

Statements like Waters’ and Pelosi’s obfuscate the charade that was Feinstein’s final chapter, and the role prominent Democratic Party politicians played in it. We’d all be better served by calling out the damaging indiscretions that led us to this moment.

Many of the Democrats now lauding Feinstein were instrumental in helping her get reelected during the 2018 midterms, when she was 84 years old and signs of her decline were already growing obvious to her colleagues. Over the next few years, the rumor mill intensified; in 2020, the New Yorker spoke to anonymous aides and other insiders who described Feinstein as “seriously struggling” and characterized her latest term as a “disaster.” By early 2022, the New York Times referred to the senator’s “acute short-term memory issues” as an “open secret,” citing anonymous sources’ concerns about serious lapses in both awareness and judgment. 

Yet, whenever their names were attached, Feinstein’s employees and allies made a concerted effort to argue that she had no reason to retire. Or worse, that she absolutely had to keep working, for the good of the country. 

Even earlier this year, when the senator missed almost three months of work due to shingles, most powerful Democrats — a few House members aside — refused to call for her to step down, let alone talk about whether she was able to perform the basic duties of her job representing the most populous state in the country. This cowardice and ass-covering came despite the public’s increasing skepticism about Feinstein’s fitness to govern. When she returned to the job, her fragile condition became impossible to hide; only then did her office confirm that she had suffered serious side effects from her bout with the virus, including brain swelling and partial facial paralysis.

Line up the available evidence, and it’s difficult to tell (to put it extremely politely) whether Feinstein did, in fact, make her own decisions about staying in office, especially given the recent reveal that her daughter had received limited power of attorney over the senator’s legal affairs shortly before her death. 

This all could’ve been avoided in the lead-up to the fall of 2017, when Feinstein announced that she intended to run for a sixth term. She should never have run for reelection. Although delegates for the California Democratic Party actually ended up backing Feinstein challenger Kevin de Leon in July 2018, he proved to be an ineffective (and later, racist) politician. 

And practically speaking, once Feinstein gained the endorsements of heavy hitters, she effectively neutralized the threat of any serious competition for her seat. Endorsers included former President Barack Obama, current President Joe Biden, now-Vice President Kamala Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, California Reps. Adam Schiff and Waters, former California Gov. Jerry Brown, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, now-Sen. Alex Padilla, and former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.

Feinstein started that sixth term by lecturing literal children about why they needed to chill out about the threat of climate change. It was a shameful performance, though not necessarily out of character for a senator who long conflated centrism with pragmatism. But it wasn’t long before her behavior became erratic, and her memory lapses became more obvious, including in a clip of her asking then-CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey the same question twice in a row at a November 2020 hearing. 

“Feinstein’s staff has said that sometimes she seems herself, and other times unreachable,” a December 2020 New Yorker article said. The same article alleged that then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had one of his former aides keep an eye on Feinstein during Judiciary Committee hearings for the 2018 confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh and the 2020 confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett. Schumer didn’t trust Feinstein to lead the committee without a minder.

After the conclusion of Barrett’s confirmation hearing, the New Yorker reported that Schumer politely asked Feinstein to step down from the top Democratic position on the committee — a conversation he reportedly had to repeat, because Feinstein “seemed to forget about the conversations soon after they talked.” While Feinstein eventually agreed to step down, those debacles were still not enough for Democrats to publicly acknowledge her decline, or more importantly, push for her to resign from her Senate position entirely.

Feinstein’s term continued, and her health rapidly diminished. In April 2022, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on an “unnerving” and “jarring” interaction with an unnamed lawmaker in which Feinstein repeatedly forgot whom she was talking to, and what she was supposed to be talking about. Another Democratic senator told the Chronicle, “It’s bad, and it’s getting worse,” speaking of Feinstein’s acuity. (They spoke anonymously.) Some of the only Democrats who agreed to be named in the story were Padilla and Pelosi, who both defended Feinstein, with Pelosi characterizing concerns about the senator’s fitness to serve as “ridiculous attacks.”

And yet, a month later, in a New York magazine phone interview — her staff’s preferred interview method on the rare occasion she was made available to the press in recent years — “Feinstein spoke in halting tones, sometimes trailing off mid-sentence or offering a non sequitur before suddenly alighting upon the right string of words,” according to the profile.

At the beginning of 2023, Politico nicely summed up where things stood, writing, “The stories about [Feinstein’s cognitive fitness] 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.” 

In mid-February, Feinstein finally pledged not to run in the next election; still, no major supporters of hers would call for her resignation. Her shingles diagnosis came a few weeks later, keeping her away from work and leaving the Senate Judiciary Committee deadlocked for three crucial months. Republicans were able to hold up several federal judge appointees from Biden. In April, flailing Democrats meekly asked Republicans to allow a temporary replacement for Feinstein on the committee, but Republicans rejected the request. 

That refusal turned into Democrats’ get-out-of-jail-free card. By this point, few Democrats were willing to say on-the-record that they believed Feinstein was actually fit to serve. Instead, many pivoted to a faulty claim that quickly became canon: Feinstein simply couldn’t resign, the narrative went, because Republicans would refuse to seat her permanent replacement, which would cause a much longer logjam on the Judiciary Committee.

Never mind that GOP leadership repeatedly affirmed, and has since reaffirmed, that they wouldn’t block a permanent replacement on the Judiciary Committee. (It’s an obvious concession, given it would set a precedent that could tangibly hurt Republicans: There are 14 Republican senators over the age of 70, after all.) Anytime anyone raised the possibility of Feinstein’s resignation, the same convenient excuse was rolled out. 

The ass-covering was in full effect — and boy was it was depressing and inhumane, including Hillary Clinton’s comment in May: “I don’t know what’s in her heart about whether she really would or wouldn’t [retire], but right now, she can’t,” Clinton opined, as though the 90-year-old senator were a prisoner.

Even after her return to work in May, Feinstein missed votes and public events; when she was present on Capitol Hill, she was reportedly guarded by her staff, as well as Pelosi’s daughter Nancy Prowda and Capitol Hill security. These bodyguards frequently engaged in naked attempts to keep the senator away from the press. Feinstein’s few public exposures were ugly, including a moment shortly after her return, when she told reporters she’d never actually stopped working, and didn’t know what they were talking about. In July, Sen. Patty Murray was caught on a hot mic instructing Feinstein to vote “aye” on a bill, while Feinstein read off a piece of paper. It took interruptions by both an aide and Murray to finally get her to stop reading and vote as instructed. When I emailed her office for an explanation, staff told me that Feinstein had been “preoccupied” after a “chaotic” meeting.

Back in California, Feinstein’s final months were tainted by a messy web of familial lawsuits filed in San Francisco Superior Court. The lawsuits involved Feinstein’s daughter Katherine, who filed several suits on the senator’s behalf, as well as the executors of her deceased husband Richard Blum’s estate and the three children from Blum’s first marriage. Troubling details emerged: Feinstein had given limited power of attorney to her daughter, who alleged in a filing that the senator was the victim of financial elder abuse by the executors of one of her late husband’s trusts. 

The lawsuits made clear what Democratic Party politicians would not: Even Feinstein’s own family no longer believed she was capable of making decisions for herself. When asked about the lawsuits by the San Francisco Chronicle, Feinstein indicated she had no idea what the reporter was talking about. (In a follow-up phone call, she reversed course, saying, “I’ve entrusted my daughter to handle those things that I believe she can. And she’s very smart, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll change it. But so far, so good.”)

On Aug. 8, Feinstein fell at her home, requiring a brief hospitalization for undisclosed injuries. The next day, Padilla and Pelosi appeared at the Lake Tahoe Summit, an annual event that Feinstein spearheaded decades ago; Padilla told reporters that Feinstein’s Lake Tahoe Summit absence had nothing to do with her hospitalization. “Sen. Feinstein is still very active,” he said. “I’m learning anything and everything I can while she’s still in office so that I can help carry the torch after she retires.”

Pelosi was equally dismissive of concerns that anything was amiss. “Yesterday was almost a non-event,” she told reporters at the summit. “To be on the safe side, they said, ‘Let’s go to the hospital.’ They said there was no reason for her to be there, so she went home.”

In August, Pelosi reiterated to Politico that Feinstein was “doing OK, she’s doing OK. She’ll be able to do what she needs to do to vote.” 

A month later, the six-term senator was dead. Today, her political allies want to rewrite Feinstein’s final chapter as a tale of empowerment, while erasing their role in this yearslong disgrace. Don’t let them.