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Last Updated June 22, 2005
Dianne Feinstein, California's senior senator, is a Democrat first elected in 1992. 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 2003 at $32 million, the twelfth highest in Congress. 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 her relations with Davis, elected governor in 1998 and 2002 and recalled in 2003, were not always warm; she appeared in two spots for him in the 2003 recall campaign that did not mention his name. 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, Feinstein 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 has a moderate to liberal voting record, and has differed on some issues from her colleague and Bay area neighbor Barbara Boxer. Feinstein sponsored the Y2K liability act opposed by trial lawyers, for example, and voted to repeal the marriage penalty and the estate tax. She supported the 2001 Bush tax cut and voted for the Iraq war resolution in October 2002 and the $87 billion supplemental in November 2003. She took the lead in supporting school vouchers for the District of Columbia in 2003. "As a former mayor, I also believe that local leaders should have an opportunity to experiment with programs that they believe are right for their area." She supported the Medicare/prescription drug bill in November 2003. When she ran for governor in 1990 she emphasized her support of the death penalty and of abortion rights, and on the Judiciary Committee she has taken tough stands. 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. Feinstein sought to crack down on Internet piracy of movies in 2003 and blocked for a time reauthorization of the moratorium on Internet taxation. She has sought to limit the sale of pseudophedrine to 9 grams to choke off the illegal meth trade. She opposed the Bush immigration plan in January 2004, arguing that it "could be a magnet for more illegal immigrants." She has criticized Mexico for not granting extradition of criminal defendants to the United States. In 2000 she introduced a bill to require licensing of all guns and in 2004 pressed fervently for reauthorization of the 1994 assault weapons ban. George W. Bush had said in 2000 that he would sign such a bill, but despite Feinstein's frequent pleas did nothing to bring it forward; the act expired in September 2004. With Patty Murray she co-sponsored an unsuccessful amendment in March 2004 which would have imposed multiple penalties for homicides causing the death of a fetus, but would not have defined the latter as a separate crime. With Harry Reid, she blocked an Indian Affairs Committee bill to reduce state supervision of Indian gambling. With Orrin Hatch, she got 54 senators to sign a letter calling for more embryonic stem-cell research. She has joined other Judiciary Committee Democrats in opposing and filibustering several Bush nominees to federal appeals court. In 2002 she and Boxer blocked the nomination of Orange County Congressman Christopher Cox to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a bench so liberal that it is frequently reversed 9-0 by the Supreme Court. With Boxer, she made an arrangement with the Bush administration to set up six-member panels to decide on the potential merits of federal trial judges in California; three members were appointed by each side, and four votes is required for approval of a nominee. 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 voted for the Iraq war resolution in October 2002--an act unpopular with many California Democrats. In January 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. Hours after Colin Powell spoke at the United Nations in February 2003 she took a different view: "I no longer think inspections are going to work." In April 2004 she said she was misled into voting for the war by an exaggeration of the threat, and regretted her vote. In December 2004 she called on Bush to "tell the American people the truth" that troops would be required in Iraq for many years. But in January 2005 she introduced Condoleezza Rice to the Foreign Relations Committee and warmly supported her nomination to be secretary of state. On nuclear weapons, Feinstein in 2003 and 2004 sought to deny funding to studies of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (the bunker buster bomb) and the Advanced Concepts Initiative (a low-yield nuclear bomb). On the Intelligence Committee, she called for a single national intelligence director in 2002, long before the 9/11 Commission recommended one and voted in September 2004 to confirm Porter Goss as CIA director. But in November she said the changes he was making could have "a significant and negative effect on the agency." Feinstein has a seat on Appropriations, where she can funnel money to California, and on Energy and Natural Resources, where she works on water issues. She has worked for several years to revive the CALFED water program, 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. She was blocked in 2001 and 2002 by Republicans from other western states who thought California was drawing too much water from the Colorado River water until a January 2003 change. In 2003 and 2004 she worked with House Resources Chairman Richard Pombo to reauthorize CALFED and to protect water quality in San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento Delta. She also worked with Pombo and with Western Republican senators in 2003 to get passage of a compromise Healthy Forests Act. She managed to protect California's strict emissions standards on small engines from federal preemption in 2003 and 2004, with help from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Feinstein has had only one serious challenge since she was first elected in the Senate, in the Republican year of 1994 from one-term Congressman Michael Huffington. In 1992 Huffington spent $3 million of his own money to unseat an 18-year incumbent in the Republican primary in the Santa Barbara area House seat. In 1994 he spent nearly $30 million of his own money against Feinstein. He 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 Arianna Huffington, now an outspoken liberal, 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%. She carried Los Angeles County 52%-40% and the San Francisco Bay area 63%-30%, offsetting Huffington's margins in Southern California and the rest of the state. Since 1994 Feinstein has gotten pretty solid ratings in the polls. In late 1997 she gave some thought to running for governor; in 2003 some Democrats tried to persuade her to put herself on the replacement ballot in the recall election. But both times she declined to seek the office she lost in 1990. In 2000 she was opposed by Republican Congressman Tom Campbell, a libertarian Stanford Law professor who had nearly won the 1992 nomination to run against Barbara Boxer and who, in a more Republican California than it is now, might have won. Campbell 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 was outspent by $10.3 million to $4.4 million, and his stand on drugs failed to make inroads among Democrats. Feinstein won 56%-37%, carrying all major regions of the state. She won 5,932,000 votes, the most popular votes cast for a senator in American history, a record eclipsed by Barbara Boxer in 2004. Feinstein has made it plain she will run for reelection in 2006; in December 2004 she said, "There's no doubt I'm running,. I've been effective. I've been a strong senator for California." Absent an opponent who can self-finance as Michael Huffington did or who can raise the kind of money Arnold Schwarzenegger has, she is a heavy favorite for reelection.
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