That’s Ageist! and Ableist!
I’m referring to increasing calls for California Senator Dianne Feinstein to resign since she is missing so many Senate votes due to illness.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on Feinstein’s illness and absence:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein has missed 58 Senate votes since getting sick in late February with the painful, but non-life-threatening shingles virus.Her extended absence, along with that of Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman, has made it more difficult for the Senate to confirm President Biden’s nominees and pass legislation. The Senate has a 51-49 party split favoring Democrats, but the absence of multiple senators changes how many votes are needed for a measure to succeed. Vice President Kamala Harris has cast three tie-breaking votes this year in her role as president of the Senate.Feinstein was hospitalized in early March for treatment and returned to her San Francisco home on March 7. She has not been in Washington, D.C., since the onset of the illness. She has missed 60 votes of the 82 taken in 2023 so far, including two prior to her illness.
CNN reports how this is interfering with Democrats’ ability to confirm judges:
The remarkable pace with which President Joe Biden has sought to remake the federal bench has been put into jeopardy by dual threats: Democratic Senate absences and a Senate rule that gives Republicans the ability to veto district court nominees for courts in their home states….But even if Democrats wanted to push forward, the absence of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, away from Senate for several weeks with a case of shingles, stands in the way. Without Feinstein on the panel, the partisan breakdown is 10-10.No date has been given for the 89-year-old Feinstein to come back to Washington.Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin acknowledged to CNN that Feinstein’s absence has slowed down their push to confirm nominees.“I can’t consider nominees in these circumstances because a tie vote is a losing vote in committee,” Durbin said.Asked if her absence has longer ramifications on the Democrats’ ability to confirm nominees, the Senate chairman said “yes, of course it does,” pointing to the long process of getting nominees scheduled for votes during precious floor time.
This has led to calls for Feinstein to resign. From Kylie Chung at Jezebel:
Feinstein’s team has been tight-lipped about when, if at all, she’ll return to D.C. Her spokesperson told the Chronicle this week that the 89-year-old “continues to work from home in San Francisco as she recuperates.” Earlier this year, Feinstein announced she won’t seek reelection in 2024 as a handful of Democratic House members vie for her seat. But she intends to serve out the rest of her term, which is set to end in January 2025. That’s close to two years from now, and it’s troubling to consider all the key votes and confirmation processes that could be stalled by Feinstein’s absence—either now or in the future, if she becomes ill again—given Democrats’ razor-thin 51-49 majority.* * *Feinstein represents 40 million Americans and serves on four Senate committees. It seems we can both thank her for her service and decades of blazing a path for women in politics and recognize that her remaining in the Senate past her ability to do her job isn’t exactly a feminist victory—not when women and pregnant people stand to be harmed the most by the stalled confirmation of liberal judges.
John Lovett, an influential Democrat media type, demands Feinstein resign:
Crooked Media co-founder Jon Lovett said Tuesday that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) should resign, noting that her current absence from the upper chamber is preventing the Senate from confirming justices.“There’s been a lot of reporting about Dianne Feinstein no longer being fit to serve in the Senate representing the biggest state in this country. She is currently out for shingles. That is sad. That is obviously not her fault,” he said on his “Pod Save America” podcast.Lovett, a former speechwriter for former President Obama, noted that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has referenced the challenge her absence poses.“But because she is not in the Judiciary Committee, Durbin has said that it has made it basically impossible to move a lot of these lower court nominees to the Senate for a vote, which means that Dianne Feinstein, who should not be in the Senate, is now preventing us from being able to confirm judges,” Lovett said.“I think what the people around Dianne Feinstein are doing, allowing, being part of this farce of having a lack of a senator in such an important job is really wrong,” Lovett continued. “And Dianne Feinstein should no longer be in the Senate. She has to resign and more people should be calling on her to resign.”
The New Republic calls it a Dianne Feinstein Problem and calls for her to resign:
The once-whirring judicial appointment machine has suddenly ground to a halt. Last month, Reuters reported that “only two candidates for lifetime positions as judges appeared before [the House Judiciary Committee] for its first judicial nominations hearing in five weeks, even though two of President Joe Biden’s other nominees were pending long enough to appear before it too.” ….Dianne Feinstein, the 89-year-old senior senator from California, was reportedly hospitalized for shingles last month, forcing Democrats, who now hold a one-seat majority on the Judiciary Committee, to cancel multiple markup sessions. As Bloomberg reported recently, Feinstein’s absence—along with Durbin’s own after he caught Covid-19—meant that the Judiciary Committee “also missed three other opportunities to schedule those meetings in March. Delays have prevented 10 nominees, ripe for markups from getting votes.” ….This is unacceptable. It is also, like Durbin’s continued inexplicable deference to blue slips, easily resolvable. It is time for Feinstein to resign her seat.
dd
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