Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is 88 years old. According to a new report, some of her Democrat colleagues have concerns about her ability to carry out her job duties.
Their complaints are similar to conservative concerns about Joe Biden’s advanced age and mental acuity.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
Colleagues worry Dianne Feinstein is now mentally unfit to serve, citing recent interactionsWhen a California Democrat in Congress recently engaged in an extended conversation with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, they prepared for a rigorous policy discussion like those they’d had with her many times over the last 15 years.Instead, the lawmaker said, they had to reintroduce themselves to Feinstein multiple times during an interaction that lasted several hours.Rather than delve into policy, Feinstein, 88, repeated the same small-talk questions, like asking the lawmaker what mattered to voters in their district, they said, with no apparent recognition the two had already had a similar conversation.The episode was so unnerving that the lawmaker — who spoke to The Chronicle on condition they not be identified because of the sensitivity of the topic — began raising concerns with colleagues to see if some kind of intervention to persuade Feinstein to retire was possible. Feinstein’s term runs through the end of 2024. The conversation occurred several weeks before the death of her husband in February…Four U.S. senators, including three Democrats, as well as three former Feinstein staffers and the California Democratic member of Congress told The Chronicle in recent interviews that her memory is rapidly deteriorating. They said it appears she can no longer fulfill her job duties without her staff doing much of the work required to represent the nearly 40 million people of California.
The advanced age of some Democrats is something the party is going to have to deal with at some point.
As Ed Morrissey of Hot Air points out, replacing Feinstein wouldn’t be difficult for California Governor Gavin Newsom:
The easiest thing for them to do would be to jolly Feinstein along for the next two years and ask her not to run in 2024, which she’s probably not inclined to do anyway. But if her capacity has declined as badly as the SF Chronicle article indicates, then she’s probably not capable of continuing in office. They would need her to resign and allow Gavin Newsom to appoint a successor that could then run for a full term in 2024.That would most likely be Ro Khanna, but Newsom might feel pressure to appoint a woman to that position — Karen Bass, who would also check the box on having California’s first black woman in the US Senate. Whomever Newsom appoints would have the inside track on the Democratic primary for the seat in 2024, but not necessarily a lock on it.
Feinstein joined the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1969, became mayor of the city in 1978, and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992. She will be 89 in June of this year.
If she worked in the private sector, she would have been retired long before now.
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