Someone Has to Do Something About Dianne Feinstein

This has gone on long enough. The next time she misses a vote, it has to be her last.

Kent Nishimura / Getty Images via LA Times

About a month ago I wrote a concise and (I thought) sensitive blog about the limitations of a gerontocracy, and the moral imperative to pave the way for the next generation, rather than gate-keep them out of power. That blog was inspired by the continuing struggles of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is (sort of) back at her elected post after recovering from a debilitating case of shingles and not recovering from a (suspected) debilitating case of dementia. This is not that blog. We are past that now. This blog would like to point out something else, namely: What the fuck man. Come on. Let’s end this charade.

Per Slate, yesterday:

I asked her how she was feeling.

“Oh, I’m feeling fine. I have a problem with the leg.” A fellow reporter staking out the elevator asked what was wrong with the leg.

“Well, nothing that’s anyone concern but mine,” she said.

When the fellow reporter asked her what the response from her colleagues had been like since her return, though, the conversation took an odd turn.

“No, I haven’t been gone,” she said.

OK.

“You should follow the—I haven’t been gone. I’ve been working.”

When asked whether she meant that she’d been working from home, she turned feisty.

“No, I’ve been here. I’ve been voting,” she said. “Please. You either know or don’t know.”

After deflecting one final question about those, like Rep. Ro Khanna, who’ve called on her to resign, she was wheeled away.

To her credit, Feinstein has managed to vote three times in the past week, performing, at least nominally, the bare function of her job. But as anyone who has eyes to read any account of her appearing in public or look at a photo of her in her current state can attest, this is a tenuous situation at best. And the controversy around her office is not relegated to her lack of performance alone. Instead, it seems as though the senior senator from California’s office has been in shambles for quite some time. In an excerpt from his new book, Washington Post reporter Ben Terris described the frustrating story of Jamarcus Purley, a former Feinstein staffer who quit his job after taping himself smoking a joint in Feinstein’s office, an act he said was in protest of the myriad of indignities both he and Feinstein’s constituents have suffered under her “leadership.”