In her role as ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a noticeably slowed 87-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) will be spearheading the war against President Trump's Supreme Court nominee. That prospect has several blue senators reportedly wringing their hands, in another sign that Democrats are high on emotion but low on planning.
An article in Politico bluntly mapped out the heart of the criticism:
"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."
A Democratic senator speaking on condition of anonymity told the media outlet that the coming hearings on the nominee are expected to be "extraordinarily contentious," and many in the party have no confidence that the aged Feinstein will be up to the task. "She's not sure what she's doing," the senator said. "If you take a look at [the hearings for Justice Brett] Kavanaugh, we may be short two senators because of that. And if this gets [messed] up, it may be the same result."
Guts and Competency Questioned
During that 2018 nomination battle, Democrats were angered that Feinstein had for weeks sat on spurious and wholly unproven sexual assault allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford against Kavanaugh rather than reveal them early in the process. It speaks to blue fears that Feinstein is not capable of waging the kind of vicious street fight against a Trump nominee that the party demands and expects.
Feinstein also was widely pilloried for raising Judge Amy Coney Barrett's Catholic faith as an issue when Barrett was up for an appeals court seat in 2017. "The dogma lives loudly within you," Feinstein ominously challenged Barrett, ineptly setting herself up for richly deserved public rebuke. That moment stokes worries of a bumbling Feinstein failing to control the narrative.
"She can't pull this off," a second Democratic senator told Politico. It took the minority party this long to figure that out? Chickens, meet roost.
Absurd Optics
Look at what is about to happen here. An increasingly leftist Democratic Party that reflexively resorts to hysteria and raw emotion is about to leap into its latest crusade with an 87-year-old Swamp veteran who, many would argue, has spent decades enriching herself and her family by suckling on the federal teat.
Feinstein has been a major political player since the late 1970s when she became mayor of San Francisco. Her close ties to China go back as far. A member of her personal staff for 20 years turned out to be a Chinese spy. Her husband began making lucrative business deals with that nation after Feinstein became a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1995. Feinstein's net worth was estimated to be $94 million in 2018, making her the second-wealthiest serving senator as of that time. Here is your Resistance hero, brave blue warriors against Trump's fascism. Let's save the republic!
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Ignore the Problem
How could they have let it come to this? Even the slightest bit of foresight would have easily envisioned this exact scenario playing out. But Democrats decided to punt rather than address the young, upstart, ideological Progressive vs. Old Guard graft Establishment divide that has plagued their party for most of the past two decades and gotten far worse since Barack Obama exited the White House in January 2017.
The clash was never more evident than in the fall of 2018 when a then 78-year-old Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) sought to reclaim her role as Speaker after Dems took back the House. Pelosi's entire leadership cadre was made up of crumbling old warhorses desperate to cling to their ossified power positions on Capitol Hill for just a little while longer. Liberty Nation wrote at the time:
"Such sentiments give more evidence of what has been the biggest problem throughout the party for several years running: The clinging to power of aging veteran pols and the inability or outright refusal to cultivate younger members for leadership positions."
Pelosi, of course, managed to muscle her way back into the Speakership and is now the main face of Democrats in Congress. That face is 80 years old.
Yet at the very same time that the Old Guard was managing to secure its arthritic grip on congressional leadership spots, Democrats were ratcheting up their hyper-partisan progressive extremism. Trump is the blast furnace that feeds these fires.
Wild-eyed radicalism is being asked to mesh with geriatric political machinery like peanut butter with jelly. Unsurprisingly, it isn't proving to be a harmonious working model. Democrats have spent the past four years repeatedly invoking Defcon Five mode while doing absolutely nothing to properly organize their battle formations. It denotes a lack of seriousness that is impossible to dismiss.
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