Health Care

Dianne Feinstein Would Like You To Respect Her Authoritah

8 Comments

California’s senior Senator has heard the talk, has heard the voices of her constituents, and basically doesn’t care.

“We are getting to the point if people aren’t going to respond to the patience and openness of Senator Baucus, we should begin to make a different plan,” said Andrew Stern, president of the 2 million-member SEIU.

Stern said his organization issued a release chastising Feinstein last week, because she should “put her foot on the gas, not the brake” on health reform.

“The gas pedal to go where?” Feinstein replied, explaining she has questions about how a broad expansion of health coverage will be paid for.

“I do not think this is helpful. It doesn’t move me one whit,” she said. “They are spending a lot of money on something that is not productive.”

What we have here is a difference of opinion over the nature of representative democracy.  Are politicians elected to reflect the will of their constituents, or are they elected to provide their own enlightened opinion on public affairs and public policy?  Sen. Feinstein has already given her perspective before.  She acknowledged that public opinion in California was sharply against authorizing the war in Iraq, but she voted for it anyway, arguing that she knew things her constituents didn’t know (namely, hundreds of lies told by the Bush Administration).  On health care, she has the same perspective; we, the citizens of California, had an “accountability moment” in 2006, Feinstein was elected, and now we can all STFU as she applies her own reasoning and belief on health care and other topics.

Needless to say, I don’t agree with her perspective.  It sounds to me like something that a member of the House of Lords would say rather than a politician in this country.  Not to mention the fact that it cuts completely against the trend of participatory democracy that has energized the Democratic side of the aisle since Howard Dean’s campaign in 2003-04.  Dianne Feinstein thinks your role as a citizen is to vote for her and then keep quiet for six years and she bequeaths her wisdom.

If you don’t agree with her, contact her office.  I’m sure her staff will file that away somewhere.

8 thoughts on “Dianne Feinstein Would Like You To Respect Her Authoritah”

  1. what is the point of me voting for her when there are republicans in this state better on many issues than she is?

    I’m getting tired of being told to support Boxer and Feinstein, only to see them capitulate to the right over and over over, or capitulate to some big donor of theirs.

    if this is “better” than having Republicans in office, I’m not sure that it’s that much better. at least with Republicans you know how they’ll screw people over. with these two, it’s anyone’s guess.

    oh but pro choice, women senators blah blah blah. Whatever. They can do what they like but they don’t need my cash to do it, I’ll spend it on local races instead.

  2. Mostly, Feinstein’s spouting off to Ceci “Clueless” Connolley is an opportunity for us.  I’d rather she did the right thing.  But if she wants to draw a line in the sand over this, then now is a good time to start kicking up sand for us.

    Hopefully, MoveOn and the CourageCampaign folk will take this for the opportunity it is, and keep the focus on Feinstein.  Certainly, when she says “leftists”, what she really means is “constituents”, since the things we’re pushing for are broadly popular.  And they’re a lot more popular than the insurance companies are.

    I’m not sure what the best means of escalating this is.  To really annoy her, we need to (1) get into the dead-tree media, and (2), get on local TV news.  This is hard.  Is there any way we can:

    • Raise money for a good old-fashioned half-page newspaper ad.  This would cost a lot of money, and would perversely be less visible than the sorts of things we do on the web.  But it is visible to the sort of people Feinstein “takes seriously”, and would be that much more annoying as a result.
    • Bring enough people to one of Feinstein’s offices at one time to guarantee that we got a few arrests.  Done right, this could bring some TV in with it.  If enough older and dignified looking people were involved, the images of the arrested people would tend to overwhelm the likely unsympathetic tone of the local reporters.
    • Another censure attempt via the state Democratic Party might be a good idea as well, since the dead-tree political reporters would probably not be able to ignore it, especially if enough county party committees signed on.

    I don’t think that “she’s rich and so’s her husband” angle is going to be as helpful.  I’m also skeptical about the “no difference with Lieberman” angle as well, especially since some of the people pushing it don’t seem to know much about DiFi save that she’s Jewish.

    But royalist and out-of-touch might work well.  A “let-them-eat-cake” type of campaign might really push her over the edge.

  3. It takes quite a while to get through.  My sense is that the “cut off after two minutes” message recorded by Feinstein is, well, not entirely factual, so keep holding until they pick up.

    I asked about the Connelly piece, and said that if most Californians want a public option (Field Poll says we do, IIRC), then it isn’t “leftists” who complain about this — it’s constituents.  So the question is: does DiFi represent her constituents, or the insurance companies.  The beleaguered woman answering the phone (who was both polite and professional, to her credit) said that it wasn’t that DiFi was “against” a public option, it was just that she had not endorsed any particular piece of legislation.  I said that I’d prefer that she show real leadership in favor of the public option, which she isn’t.

    And arguably, DiFi is showing leadership on this leadership.  The leadership of a real saboteur.  She’s working on the side of Baucus and Conrad, against effective reform and in favor of the insurance industry.  Well, she’s not the senator from Montana, and she’s not the senator from North Dakota.  She’s the senator of a huge state with more than 6 million of the US’s 46M uninsured.

    We need to keep up the heat, and we need to be both creative and bold in the options we use to force our senior senator to actual listen to her constituents.

    Diane Feinstein is suffering from a serious political hearing loss.  Yell louder.

  4. What a push to censor at CDP EBd would produce.If Labor and Courage Campaign and MoveOn put something together I’d be interested in the reaction relative to the last attempt for such a Resolution. At the very least it should be possible to get something out of some of the Caucuses.I’m a very disappointed former DiFi supporter.

  5. Great post.  By the way, whatever happened to the Courage Campaign’s effort to censure Dianne Feinstein?  I recall we got a lot of Democratic Central Committees to pass resolutions for it, but not the San Francisco DCCC.

    I would love to see the San Francisco DCCC vote to censure Dianne Feinstein.  Not just because its current progressive composition probably means we have the votes, but it will make her proxy on the Committee’s head explode.

  6. I agree with her sentiment about “the gas pedal to go where?”

    If it’s what Max Baucus wants, I’m pretty sure it’s not what I want. Baucus doesn’t even want a “public option”, and we don’t even know what the “public option” is.

    Any proposal that just makes insurance companies richer and more entrenched while they continue to deny care is not really progress.

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