GQP Will Not Agree To Feinstein Substitution On Judiciary Committee. ‘What Is Dianne Feinstein Still Doing Here?’

Update to Dianne Feinstein Needs To Resign; Dick Durbin Needs To Jettison The Senate ‘Blue Slip’ For Judicial Nominees.

CNN reports, GQP revolts against plan to replace Feinstein on key panel in push to block Biden judicial picks:

Senate Republicans are prepared to block Democratic efforts to replace Sen. Dianne Feinstein on the powerful Judiciary committee, ratcheting up pressure on the 89-year-old California Democrat to resign or return quickly to allow President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees to be confirmed.

Democrats would need 60 votes to replace Feinstein on the panel, but senior Republicans in leadership and on the committee made clear Monday that they would not give them the votes to do that. The result: At least 12 nominees — and maybe more — could be stalled if Feinstein does not return soon.

The stakes are high for Democrats, who could see key agenda items thwarted – both on the committee and on the Senate floor – if they are unable to replace Feinstein and the California Democrat does not return to Washington soon.

Many congressional Democrats have remained largely supportive of Feinstein’s decision to remain in office while absent from the Capitol as she continues to recover from shingles. But Feinstein has faced calls to resign from two House Democrats, and if Democrats are not able to replace her on the committee that number could grow in the days ahead.

Sen. John Cornyn, a senior member on the Senate Judiciary Committee and close adviser to Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, told CNN that he opposes the effort to replace Feinstein on panel.

Cornyn’s comments were echoed by top Republicans and a clear sign Democrats lack the vote they need.

Sen. Chuck Grassley — the 89-year-old Republican and senior committee member — contended the current situation has nothing to do with senatorial courtesy.

“I don’t think senatorial courtesy will work to move liberal judges,” he told CNN.

Senate GOP Whip John Thune suggested Democrats are using their request to remove Feinstein from her post as a way to put “pressure” on her to resign. “The Dems are sort of using this because they want pressure on her to resign and I think this gives them … sort of a lever to do that,” he said.

Thune added that he thinks, based on the response so far from GOP members, that the request is certainly not going to be a “slam dunk” for Democrats.

Sen. Joni Ernst told reporters, “we’re not going to help the Democrats with that” when asked if she’d back a resolution to temporarily replace Feinstein.

Republican Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, both members of the committee, took to Twitter to express opposition.

“I will not go along with Chuck Schumer’s plan to replace Senator Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee and pack the court with activist judges,” Blackburn said on Monday.

“Republicans should not assist Democrats in confirming Joe Biden’s most radical nominees to the courts,” Cotton tweeted over the weekend.

Whether or not Democrats are able to replace Feinstein on the panel could have major implications on Biden’s efforts to fill the judiciary and shake up the California Senate race.

That’s because if Republicans deny Democrats the 60 votes needed to remove Feinstein from committee, as she has requested after being out for the past two months due to shingles, it will only intensify pressure on Feinstein to resign from the Senate. If she does, it could very well rattle the California Senate race given that Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has previously vowed to name a Black woman to the position — and it’s unclear if that appointed senator may also compete for Feinstein’s seat in 2024.

Schumer has said he will ask the Senate this week to make the change, but when he will do so is subject to tedious negotiations on the front end to see what is possible before he brings it to the floor.

There is a reason that while Feinstein has been gone, the Senate Judiciary Committee has had to repeatedly postpone votes on judges. Without Feinstein, the committee is tied. Under the power-sharing agreement in the last Congress, which had a 50-50 Senate, there was a provision that allowed for a tied nominee to be discharged from committee and put on the floor. That rule is no longer in place, according to an aide on the committee.

So unless a judge has bipartisan support – and some of them in the pipeline still do – the nominee fails in committee and doesn’t come to the floor.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin stopped short on Monday of calling on Feinstein to resign, saying he hopes that Republicans will help to temporarily replace her on the committee and recognize that “the rain can fall on both sides of the road.”

“The Republicans ought to think a little bit about what this means. Tomorrow, they could be facing exactly the same thing,” Durbin said.

The issue has served as a reminder that the US Senate’s average age is 65 years old, with many members older than that. The reality is that Feinstein is not the first, and will not be the last, to have an extended absence from the body. Senators are cognizant that launching a fight today over this one absence could come back to haunt the other party in the future.

When asked about the timeline for trying to replace Feinstein, Durbin punted, saying the process will “be in Sen. Schumer’s hands.”

Jonathan Chait asks, What Is Dianne Feinstein Still Doing Here? This is not fein.

At the moment, [Democrats’] judicial conveyer belt is stalled. The reason: Senator Dianne Feinstein is on medical leave, depriving Democrats of their majority on the committee. There is no way of knowing when, or even if, she will return. If Feinstein were to resign now, she could immediately be replaced by a senator able to perform his or her duties. Feinstein, however, has refused.

She recently offered to let another Senate Democrat fill her Judiciary Committee seat until such time as she can resume her duties. The trouble is this maneuver would require either unanimous consent or 60 Senate votes, and Republicans have little incentive to supply the necessary cooperation. In the meantime, the Democratic Party’s ability to restock the judiciary rests in Feinstein’s hands.

Understood by nearly any moral calculus, the choice is obvious. Feinstein is 89 years old, well past both the age and the condition at which most people retire. Her personal wealth is in the high eight figures. She would be fine. On the flip side, her retaining control of a job she cannot perform is already eating up unrecoverable time, which will have effects on the composition of the judiciary that are impossible to calculate but likely to be very large, with an impact on laws affecting millions of people.

But the calculus employed by public officials, senators in particular, tends to discard standard moral calculations. It instead places all its weight on the prerogative of the famous and powerful to hold their titles as long as they wish. The office is a kind of private-property entitlement that no larger social good can override.

[N]ancy Pelosi has, amazingly, chosen to recapitulate the defenses of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s non-retirement on Feinstein’s behalf. “I don’t know what political agendas are at work that are going after Senator Feinstein in that way. I’ve never seen them go after a man who was sick in the Senate in that way,” Pelosi told reporters yesterday.

Bonnie Kristian responds, It’s Not Sexist or Ageist to Want Your Senator in the Senate (excerpt):

Two House Democrats, Reps. Ro Khanna (Calif.) and Dean Phillips (Minn.), have called on Feinstein to resign. (In February, Feinstein said she would leave office when her term ends, in December 2024.)

To that, Rep. Norma Torres (D-Calif.) added an ageism charge, tweeting that while men are honored as they age, when “women age or get sick, the men are quick to push them aside.”

Any discussion of sex and health, aging, or politics should probably begin with the stipulation that, yes, it’s different for women. But it’s also different for senators. This is a unique and powerful institution, and it’s not sexist or ageist to want your senator to be in the Senate. Pelosi is wrong on the facts, but—maybe more important in an era of geriatric lawmakers—she’s wrong on the principle, too.

There are only two people representing 39 million residents of California in the Senate, and Feinstein is one of them. It’s not wrong to want both in Washington. In fact, it’s extremely reasonable. It’s even reasonable to hold them to a higher standard of attendance than we would people in other, less consequential lines of work.

Acknowledging that reality isn’t inhumane. It isn’t inconsistent with supporting generous sick leave policies or taking mental health care seriously. On the contrary: If lawmakers are gravely ill, they should be freed of their workload entirely, not perpetually badgered about when they’ll be back on the Hill.

Nor need we dismiss the risk in ideas like a maximum age of service or forced resignations tied to health or cognitive testing. It’s easy to imagine how over-broad rules could be unfairly applied, including in sexist and ageist ways, or abused to political ends. However, some lesser measure, like a resignation process triggered by a certain number of missed floor votes or days in session, might be worth considering if we’re going to keep having a gerontocracy.

Yet it shouldn’t take a formal rule change for lawmakers to recognize, as Phillips said while pushing Feinstein to resign, when their physical limitations have made it “a dereliction of duty to remain” in office. Likewise, voters shouldn’t feel bad about wanting our senators to be up to the task we’ve given them.

Jonathan Chait continues:

Perhaps male senators have not faced similar calls to retire, but Feinstein’s predicament is unusual. For one thing, she has stuck to the office for an unusually long time, even by senatorial standards, to a point where her colleagues and staff openly doubt her cognitive functioning. The San Francisco Chronicle reported a series of alarming anecdotes last year: One California congressional Democrat “had to reintroduce themselves to Feinstein multiple times during an interaction that lasted several hours”; “some close to her said that on her most difficult days, she does not seem to fully recognize even longtime colleagues”; “a month prior, she repeated a question to a witness, word for word, in a hearing with seemingly no awareness of having done so.”

This situation might be tolerable — if far short of ideal — as long as her staff can guide her along. But when she’s recuperating away from Washington, her constituents are effectively disenfranchised.

Finding analogous cases of male Supreme Court justices pushed to the side isn’t hard. After a private lobbying campaign, Anthony Kennedy strategically retired in 2018, at the age of 81, enabling a Republican president to name his successor. In general, men and women in many fields of American life are routinely pushed out of their jobs when they reach an advanced age (often much younger than Feinstein). And nearly all those are cases in which the social value of the job is infinitesimal compared with that of a senator holding a decisive vote.

Pelosi isn’t arguing that it’s better for women on net to allow Feinstein to stay in office. That argument would be nearly impossible given the stakes of the judiciary on abortion rights, let alone on all the other issues handled by the courts. Her case rests on elevating the individual prerogative of a senator above the millions of people she serves. It is to forget that senators are public servants at all to conceive of the role as a place of honor in American life and believe that stripping it away constitutes some form of punishment.

The Senate imagines — and to an extent conducts — itself as an exclusive club. Its splendor and majesty are a favorite subject of senatorial speeches, especially in those rare moments when the body is functioning. The effect of this belief system on the egos of the 100 members is difficult to overstate. It provides the context in which Feinstein’s overly long good-bye seems rational and not an act of almost sociopathic indifference to the people she’s supposed to be serving.