Losing a Senator could have won California greater representation

The passing of one of San Francisco’s oligarchs revealed Gavin Newsom’s reliance on identity politics to the detriment of working Californians.

The passing of the late Senator Dianne Feinstein represents not only the end of an era, but also a potential turning point in how California is represented in Washington. As our nation’s most populous and prosperous state, the stakes are bigger than they might appear from afar.

An unlikely and tragic inflection point

Feinstein owes her long career in Washington to an assassination. And I don’t mean the kind of character assassination that enabled Nancy Pelosi to hold her seat in Congress despite 35 years of ducking debates, but rather a literal assassination, in which America’s first openly gay policymaker was murdered alongside a sitting mayor.

Feinstein was the member of the Board of Supervisors who cradled her dying colleagues, the late Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, as they passed away after a shooting inside San Francisco City Hall in November, 1978. She tried to administer first aid, which led her to appear before the city in blood-stained clothes announcing their deaths.

Before the assassination, Feinstein’s career appeared over. Her time on the Board of Supervisors had not especially distinguished her. She had even publicly insinuated her plans to retire, until serving as a calming voice for a city besieged by terror in the week of the incident secured her public position and ultimately made her Mayor.

In that respect, Feinstein shares a lot with George W. Bush, whose reassuring demeanor in the wake of the 9-11 attacks seemed to win him support among confused observers. Too many deferred to the tragic—and unconstitutional, yet ultimately bipartisan—centralization of power under the Executive Branch during his administrations.

It is important to note that the assassin who murdered Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk was a colleague of theirs on the Board of Supervisors, a former police officer named Dan White.

It’s one thing for cops to kill Americans, as they do with disturbing frequency. It’s another thing for former police officers to serve on legislative bodies, as one currently does in San Francisco.

It is an entirely different thing for former police officers to murder their legislative colleagues in cold blood.

The assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone defined San Francisco for a generation, and indicated the future backlash that eventually turned City Hall to the right—but they have been papered over by those who perpetually inflate the city’s progressive culture while ignoring its consistently conservative politics.

The inheritors of Milk & Moscone’s political legacies have repeatedly betrayed their visions.

One of them was Dianne Feinstein.

On the one hand, she diversified the Senate. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in The Guardian:

[Feinstein] was one of California’s first two women senators (Barbara Boxer won office in the same 1992 election) and the nation’s first two Jewish women senators, the first female member of the Senate judiciary committee, first woman to chair the Senate rules committee, and in 2009, the first woman to preside over a presidential inauguration.

Punching down—and left—in the Senate

As a senator, however, Feinstein wielded a reliable vote for Wall Street against the interests of working Americans. A wealthy oligarch herself who was born wealthy and married a private equity mogul, she consistently supported tax breaks for the wealthy, unprovoked and fraudulent wars, and unconstitutional mass surveillance.

The surveillance regime, in particular, owes a great deal to Senator Feinstein. As former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she was in a particular position to help hold accountable the FBI, the NSA, and the CIA over the years that they ran roughshod over constitutional rights, civilian oversight, and international human rights. With one quite notable exception, she declined.

The intelligence committees in the Senate and the House owe their existence to a series of leaks in the 1970s that exposed decades of criminal activity under the guise of so-called “national security.” Congress was so alarmed by its findings in the Church and Pike committee investigations that it created bipartisan standing committees dedicated to overseeing the “three-letter” executive agencies. Under Feinstein’s watch, those agencies co-opted and largely neutralized the congressional committees charged with independent oversight.

Having spent 20 years myself fighting the surveillance apparatus that Feinstein helped engineer as a policymaker who fell asleep at the oversight switch and felt no hesitation writing blank checks for mass constitutional violations, it is difficult not to see Feinstein’s passing as an opportunity for California’s voice to become more sincerely represented in the nation’s capital.

One righteous struggle

To her credit, Feinstein did show up for work as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee at least once: when she prolifically—but unsuccessfully—stood up and tried to expose the CIA’s criminal history of torture.

The international legal prohibition against torture was established by the Second World War, and our victory over a country that shamelessly committed torture. Resigning the legal principle that we fought World War II to establish, President Bush sanctioned torture, and President Obama approved an ongoing cover up—but Senator Feinstein did her part to try to make sure that the American public knew how vast the CIA’s criminal enterprise ranged.

While Feinstein was unable to secure Obama’s approval to publicly release the report that she and the Senate Intelligence Committee staff spent years compiling, they did win Obama’s approval to publish an executive summary. It makes clear that the CIA’s deranged activities included outright crimes—but because it leaves unnamed the crucial figures in the sage, it offered no accountability despite its attempt at transparency.

Hollywood commemorated this era of Feinstein’s career in a fascinating film, the Report. It stars Adam Driver (whose other credits include Star Wars) depicting a courageous Senate staffer as he investigates the CIA’s criminal torture program.

The film does a fair job of depicting real events. Throughout, Feinstein remains the resolute interlocutor, committed to human rights principles that, for some reason, didn’t matter to her so much when she served as a cheerleader for wars from Nicaragua to Afghanistan.

While Feinstein’s struggle to hold the CIA accountable for (some of) its crimes was righteous, it was ultimately unsuccessful. The Agency’s quarterback for pushing back against the Senate—which included destroying video evidence of torture, hacking the Senate to steal evidence investigators had collected, and threatening them with criminal prosecution—served as CIA Director for three years under the Trump administration.

But that figure is a woman, which makes it easier to celebrate her as a feminist success story, breaking down doors in a male-dominated field, than to hold her accountable as an international criminal. In that respect, former CIA Director Gina Haspel has a lot in common with the late Senator Feinstein, not to mention Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi. All are wealthy white women who have played key policy roles enabling human rights violations.

Few things enrage me more than watching powerful figures enjoy impunity for grave offenses at the same time that powerless people find our families and communities the objects of relentless assaults.

Newsom panders, putting identity politics ahead of California’s interests

Because she passed away in the middle of her term, Feinstein has been replaced by Governor Gavin Newsom. Ironically, they came from the same political network, having both served as mayor of the same city, roughly 20 years apart. 

Newsom previously pledged to appoint a Black woman to fill Feinstein’s shoes should she become incapacitated, but recently announced that he would perceive his appointment as that of a caretaker—although he ultimately declined to extract a promise from his nominee that they would step down in 2024.

The pattern hints at one to which Newsom has long seem committed: pandering.

Newsom recognizes how deeply Democrats rely on the Black vote, and also how under represented California’s Black communities are on both the state and the national stage. Of course, Kamala Harris, who served as San Francisco district attorney under Gavin Newsom, is now the Vice President of the United States, and the first Black person to serve in that role.

But Kamala’s presence is largely theatrical. If anything, her work has undermined the interests of minority communities both in San Francisco and across the United States. From her legacy as a predatory prosecutor to her inability to meaningfully reform continuing human rights abuses at our nation’s borders, Harris has been a tool for the establishment since the very beginning of her career.

Their dueling presidential aspirations might help explain why Newsom pledged to appoint a Black woman to fill the Senate seat vacated by Feinstein. Most eyes turned to representative Barbara Lee, who has already announced a Senate candidacy.

Yet Newsom appointed Laphonza Butler, a protege of Kamala Harris who previously led EMILY’s List and worked in the labor movement while living in Maryland.

Newsom’s choice to pass over a social justice champion to instead embrace a moderate voice who checks many demographic boxes is a disappointing reflection of the Democratic Party’s broader strategy premised on co-opting minority communities.

Barbara Lee is one of the most visionary voices in the House of Representatives. She is the only voice in Congress to have stood up against the Bush administration’s warmongering, and to challenge the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force that served as the legal cover for everything from the invasion of Afghanistan to CIA torture.

It would be especially fitting that Barbara Lee should represent California in Washington, because she has done so more capably as a representative of Oakland, than any of her colleagues across the state. When Dianne Feinstein was writing blank checks to the surveillance state and cheerleading for wars, Barbara Lee did her part to try to stop them.

History vindicated Barbara Lee’s concerns, yet an ignorant political culture continues to throw its weight behind discredited oligarchs whose conflicts of interest somehow manage to routinely escape attention in polite corners.

Newsom’s decision to appoint Butler may appear progressive, but that perception relies on a shortsighted emphasis on identity rather than track record. As a Black woman and a lesbian, Butler is certainly poised to expand the Senate’s diversity.

All things being equal, that’s a good thing.

But LaPhonza Butler is in no way Barbara Lee’s equal.