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California: Senior Senator Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) Last Updated July 8, 2003
Dianne Feinstein, California's senior senator, has twice won far more popular votes than any other senator in American history. Feinstein grew up in San Francisco, in lush Presidio Heights, graduated from Stanford and later studied criminology. She was appointed by Governor Pat Brown to the women's parole board in 1960, at 27. In 1969 she was elected to the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors--the city's council--and twice ran for mayor and lost. As president of the board, she became mayor in 1978 when Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were murdered by former Supervisor Dan White; she discovered Moscone's body and showed steadiness and a sense of command that calmed the city. She was elected to full terms in 1979 and 1983. In 1984, Walter Mondale seriously considered her for vice president, but passed over her for Geraldine Ferraro because of qualms about the business dealings of her husband, Richard Blum. Feinstein presided gracefully that year over the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco--while Ferraro juggled questions about her family's business. In fact, Feinstein and Blum's investments have thrived; the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call estimated their net worth in 2002 at $50 million, the tenth highest in Congress. Some of Blum's investments were in businesses in China, which sparked attacks on Feinstein, a strong supporter of trade ties with China; in 1997, Blum offered to give his profits from China to charity and in the 2000 campaign he said that he had divested all his China investments. Feinstein left the mayor's office in 1987, ineligible for a third full term, and ran for governor in 1990. She won the Democratic primary impressively, then lost 49%-46% to Pete Wilson. When Wilson appointed Orange County state Senator John Seymour--an unknown and bland choice--to replace him in the Senate, Feinstein quickly announced for the seat, even though the 1992 race was for only the last two years of Wilson's term, and she could have run for the seat being vacated by Alan Cranston the same year. She had primary competition from Gray Davis, then state Controller, who ran an ad against her campaign finance practices comparing her to Leona Helmsley. Feinstein won 58%-33% and one can assume that relations between her and Davis, now governor, have not always been warm, though Davis appointed Blum to the University of California Board of Regents in 2002. In the 1992 general election, nothing worked for the hapless Seymour--not his switches to pro-choice on abortion and anti-offshore oil drilling, not his attacks on Feinstein's arguably tricky financing of her 1990 gubernatorial campaign (which resulted in a $190,000 fine), not fears of immigration, not Seymour's tending to agricultural interests. Feinstein won 54%-38%, coming close even in Seymour's southern California base. In the Senate, she kept a certain distance from the Clinton administration, negotiating for changes before voting for the 1993 budget, voting against NAFTA, withdrawing her support of the Clinton health care plan in May 1994, condemning Bill Clinton's ''I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" comment which she had heard in person. She had two significant legislative achievements in her first two years. One was the attachment of the assault weapons ban to the 1994 crime bill. When Idaho's Larry Craig argued that her definition of assault weapons was not rigorous enough and challenged her knowledge of firearms, she responded by saying: ''I know something about what firearms can do; I came to be mayor of San Francisco as a product of assassination.'' Her other major achievement was a California Desert Protection Act. Similar measures had been stymied by the state's Republican senators as too restrictive, but now that there was no Republican senator, Feinstein managed it through enactment. Feinstein surely hoped that she would face weak competition in 1994 and that her early and hard work raising money would enable her to win essentially unopposed. But then came Michael Huffington, with the determination and the cash to be the biggest spending Senate candidate, as of then. Huffington moved to Santa Barbara in 1991 and in 1992 beat an 18-year Republican congressman in the primary by spending over $3 million. His Senate campaign was lavishly financed--with nearly $30 million of his own money. Huffington pulled even in polls in September, and Feinstein was clearly flustered and angry that she could not count on heavily outspending him. Huffington slipped when it was revealed that he and his wife employed an illegal alien as a nanny. On the Thursday before the election, it was revealed that Feinstein, despite her earlier denials, had employed a woman whose work permit had expired; but the news media ran stories saying that federal officials cast doubt on whether the woman was an illegal. That probably made the difference. Feinstein won 47%-45%, carrying Coastal California--Los Angeles County, the San Francisco Bay area and the coastal counties from Santa Barbara north to the Oregon line--by 56%-36% while Huffington carried Heartland California--the rest of the state--by 54%-36%. Feinstein has a moderate to liberal voting record, and has differed on some issues from her colleague and Bay area neighbor Barbara Boxer; she sponsored the Y2K liability act opposed by trial lawyers, for example, and voted to repeal the marriage penalty and the estate tax. She has continued to push for gun control measures, like a ban on the import of high-capacity ammunition clips, with less success than in 1994; in 2000 she introduced a bill to require licensing of all guns--something gun control opponents argue would lead to confiscation. She has supported the treaty, opposed by the Bush administration, for international control of light weapons trading. Starting in 2001 Feinstein has taken a more partisan attitude on the Judiciary Committee. She voted against the confirmation of John Ashcroft. She and Boxer prevented the nomination of Orange County Congressman Christopher Cox to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, currently the most left-wing in the country, routinely reversed by unanimous vote in the Supreme Court. She and Boxer made it clear that they would stop the appointment of Bush judges in California unless they were consulted. With the White House's designated California political leader Gerald Parsky, they set up six-member panels for each of four districts in the state to decide on the merits of potential judges; three members were appointed by each side, and four votes is required for approval of a nominee (and the White House has veto power over all selections). This bypasses the two senior Republicans in the House delegation, Bill Thomas and Jerry Lewis, to whom the White House customarily looks when both state's senators are of the opposition party. Feinstein was the first Judiciary Democrat to come out against the nomination of Charles Pickering in March 2002 and, despite the entreaties of Kay Bailey Hutchison, voted against Priscilla Owen in September. Before September 11, Feinstein and Jon Kyl co-sponsored a bill to prepare defenses for attacks by terrorists with chemical and biological weapons. After the attacks, she proposed a six-month moratorium on new student visas. College and university presidents squawked; there were 548,000 foreign students in the country in 2000-01, pumping $11 billion into the economy, much of it directly into universities. In October she said she was willing to drop the moratorium if colleges and universities would verify compliance with the visas. She and Kyl came forward with a bill to establish a central database of visa holders and other aliens in the country, to bar entry for people from nations that sponsor terrorism, to require the INS and the State Department to create biometric visa cards and passports, to require foreign nations to supply airlines with passenger manifest lists and to lift the 45-minute deadline for INS inspection of incoming foreigners. This was more stringent than a similar measure sponsored by Edward Kennedy and Sam Brownback. In December the two versions were melded and it was signed into law by Bush in May 2002. Like others on the feminist left, she opposed impeachment of Bill Clinton, but wrote a proposal to censure Clinton for "immoral and reckless behavior." That did not come to the floor, and she dropped it after the Senate voted for acquittal. She supported various versions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation, with reservations. When San Francisco and Shanghai became sister cities in 1979, Feinstein got to know Mayor Jiang Zemin, who subsequently became president of China. She has been one of the most vocal supporters of renewing normal trade relations with China every year and of PNTR in 2000. In 2002 she sponsored a bill to ban reproductive cloning but allow embryonic stem cell research. She struggled to get it to the floor and claimed it had more votes than Sam Brownback's bill to ban research on embryonic stem cells, but both were blocked from the floor in June 2002. Feinstein voted for the Iraq war resolution in October 2002--an act unpopular with many California Democrats. In Jaunary 2003 she said U.S. troop deployments in the area were "deeply disturbing" in what she said was the absence of proof that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. "Iraq is effectively contained and prevented from developing weapons of mass destruction. It is not an imminent threat either to its neighbors or to the United States. And there is no need for precipitous military action under these circumstances." Hours after Colin Powell spoke at the United Nations in Ferbruary 2003 she took a different view: "I no longer think inspections are going to work." California has a long tradition of having one senator who expresses ideological views and another who works hard to represent the state's economic interests. Feinstein chose the latter role, as did her predecessors Wilson, Cranston and Thomas Kuchel. She got a seat on Appropriations, where she could funnel money to California, and on Energy and Natural Resources, where she works on water issues. As California faced rolling blackouts of electricity, she and Boxer called for controls on wholesale electricity prices; this seemed unlikely to pass, and Feinstein and Oregon Republican Gordon Smith sponsored a bill giving FERC the choice between imposing price controls or setting cost-based rates to be passed along to consumers. In 2001 and 2002 she worked to revive the CALFED water program, whose authorization had lapsed. This is the label given to a series of projects--raising Shasta Dam, building a new reservoir in Colusa County, buying up and flooding islands in the Sacramento River Delta and providing fish screens there. In May 2001 she introduced a reauthorization with a $3 billion price tag. In May 2002 she scaled it down to $1 billion, but it was still rejected in committee; Republicans from other western states blocked it as overly expensive and perhaps out of pique that California would continue to draw more than what they considered its share of Colorado River water until a January 2003 change. In October Feinstein was struggling for a $30 million authorization. After the November election, she got the Senate to agree to a bill authorizing any project that could get an appropriation over the next three years; the House balked because of opposition from northern California Republicans and the leadership's insistence on waiving Davis-Bacon rules on the projects. In January 2003 she convened a meeting of the chief players in California water policy and sought to work with the northern California House Republicans to revive CALFED. Since 1994 Feinstein has gotten pretty solid ratings in the polls. In late 1997 she gave thought to running for governor, and delivered a speech stingingly criticizing California's public school system. In 2000 she came up for reelection--her fourth statewide race in 10 years. The first Republicans to announce were Ron Unz, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose 1998 Proposition 227 ended the state's bilingual education program, state Senator Ray Haynes and San Diego County Supervisor Bill Horn--none of them well-known. Then in October 1999 Congressman Tom Campbell got into the race, at which point Unz dropped out. Campbell was elected to the House in 1988 and 1990, when Silicon Valley was much more hospitable country for Republicans, and then again in 1995; he ran for the Senate in 1992 and lost the Republican primary 38%-36% to conservative Bruce Herschensohn (many observers believe Campbell would have beaten Barbara Boxer in the fall). He took a conservative line on economics and supported abortion rights. In 1999 and 2000, his big issue was drugs: he favored more treatment and less imprisonment, and called for use of heroin in drug treatments. Campbell won the Republican nomination handily, but was outspent by $10.3 million to $4.4 million. His stand on the drug issue failed to make inroads among Democrats. Feinstein won 56%-37%. She has made it plain that she will run for reelection in 2006.
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