Sen. Dianne Feinstein turns 90 next year, at which point she will be in the penultimate year of her fifth Senate term. Finally, years after the rest of the press was privy to an open Washington secret, Feinstein’s colleagues have ramped up the pressure to force her out.
Feinstein, multiple Hill sources told the San Francisco Chronicle, is “rapidly deteriorating,” often unable to recognize colleagues in the chamber or recall conversations she just had. The only shocker is that Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the opposite chamber of Congress, stuck her neck out to protect one of her own.
Democrats only really began to debate whether Feinstein remained able to represent 40 million people when she oversaw the confirmation hearings of now-Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett as ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Feinstein’s cognitive decline has been apparent for some time now. Even before Feinstein famously turned the Brett Kavanaugh hearings into a partisan bloodbath — you may recall how the octogenarian first sat on Christine Blasey Ford’s letter until it leaked to the public — Feinstein allowed a Chinese spy to spend 20 years on her staff. In any other profession, Feinstein would have been put out to pasture long ago.
Instead, four Senators, three of whom are Democrats, are now sounding the alarm to Feinstein’s own hometown paper. Two say Feinstein failed to even recognize them, and several other people said Feinstein seemed to lose her mind while speaking at a memorial for a late San Francisco official — twice. Feinstein initially forgot to even mention the memorial’s subject, whom she had known for decades. She then returned to speak up again but spoke about the decedent in the present tense.
For her part, Pelosi deemed it “unconscionable” that Feinstein was “subjected to these ridiculous attacks that are beneath the dignity in which she has led and the esteem in which she is held.”
In part, Pelosi is practicing the same sort of class solidarity that helped catapult both her and Feinstein, two trust-fund daughters of big-city mayors, to the top of California politics. But if you think about it, she’s really just protecting her own kind — a decaying congressional vanguard that she believes deserves wealth, privilege, and power beyond accountability.
Our patricians are offensively old. President Joe Biden turns 80 this year, but this senility crisis is no partisan phenomenon. Were he to run for the presidency again and win, Donald Trump would be 78 at the start of his hypothetical second term. The problem is worse, however, deeper in the swamp. More than half of the Senate consists of senior citizens. They have little to fear about the $20 trillion in debt that they have helped amass, and most of them are very wealthy. Independent of her recently deceased husband, who left behind a billion dollars, Feinstein somehow managed to convert her career in public service into a personal net worth of nearly $100 million. Like Pelosi, a fellow multimillionaire, Feinstein has drawn fire for using her public post to line her own personal pockets.
It would seem that Feinstein has fallen victim to the elder abuse of her enablers. Californians are the other 40 million victims. Pelosi is supposed to be working for them, but this would threaten the preservation of herself and the entire gerontocracy.
