Senator Feinstein sat too long for any good she was doing
The veteran California Senator participated in the reduction of Congress to an inkblot
As Oliver Cromwell said of the British Long Parliament, United States California Senator Dianne Feinstein had sat too long for any good she was doing before announcing her intent to refrain from seeking re-election in 2024. She will have then served more than three decades in the Senate. Each year since her election to the Senate in 1992, congressional power continued to diminish to its current insignificance as an ink blot without dissent from Ms. Feinstein.
Presidents initiated multiple wars on their own despite the Constitution’s Declare War Clause entrusting that power exclusively to Congress. After Congress refused a War Declaration against Yugoslavia in 1999, President Bill Clinton bombed the country into smithereens and called it not war. Senator Feinstein was silent.
Among other things, Senator Feinstein voted to give President George W. Bush limitless discretion to attack Iraq in 2002 and stayed mute as President Barack Obama turned Libya into a wilderness and overthrew Muammar Gaddafi after he abandoned WMD. She endorses President Joe Biden’s unconstitutional threats to attack China if it invades Taiwan and Russia if it encroaches on one inch of NATO territory, including North Macedonia or Montenegro. When it came to standing up against presidential usurpations, Senator Feinstein exhibited all the courage of a watchdog that retreats to its kennel when danger appears. She even refrained from rebuking President Donald Trump’s July 23, 2019, pronunciamento, “Then I have Article 2, where I have the right to do anything I want as president.”
The Senator pronounced Edward Snowden guilty of treason for disclosing the National Security Agency’s illegal warrantless dragnet spying on “not-yet-guilty” American citizens. The reckless accusation underscored Senator Feinstein’s constitutional illiteracy. Article III, section 3 of the Constitution provides: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
As Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Feinstein declined to exercise the Senate’s constitutional authority to declassify documents in the manner of the famous Church Committee. Indeed, she bowed to President Obama’s classifying and concealing the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Torture Report from the public. She had clear constitutional power to ignore the President and share the appalling chronicle of CIA lawlessness according to the Supreme Court’s decision in Gravel v. United States (1972), upholding Senator Mike Gravel’s authority to publicize in a Senate hearing the classified 47-volumes of the Pentagon Papers.
Senator Feinstein supported unilateral surrender of the Senate’s role in treaties by defending President Obama’s nuclear arms pact with Iran as an executive agreement excluding any Senate participation whatsoever.
I do not mean to suggest that Senator Feinstein was any worse then the lion’s share of her colleagues in the diminishment of Congress to an ink blot.
But none of these constitutional blots on her Senate career have even been whispered at in the mainstream media because all are to some extent complicit. Glowing effusions over her putative landmark accomplishments took hyperbole to a new level.
Depend upon it. Senator Feinstein’s successor will be no better or even worse. The American Empire is on its last legs.