The Lioness In Winter

Dianne Feinstein Has Been the Ultimate Establishment Democrat. Will Trump at Last Bring Out Her Roar? 

- Gail Sheehy

THE SENATOR FROM California looked like someone had punched the wind out of her. On an unseasonably cold January 10, the tense first day of hearings about President Donald Trump’s nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Dianne Feinstein was pallid, with deeper than usual divots beneath her eyes. Instead of one of her trademark colorful jackets, she wore all black. Privately and politically, the previous year had been tough. Her husband had been diagnosed with lung cancer and her onetime Senate colleague Hillary Clinton had lost the battle for the White House to a man Feinstein considered beneath contempt.

That morning, after protesters dressed as Ku Klux Klan members were dragged out of the hearing room, Feinstein first signaled her allegiance to Senate tradition, saying it wasn’t easy to criticize a fellow member of the chamber. But then she laid out a formidable case against the Alabama senator and his history of abetting racism, approving torture, and battling abortion rights. “I am old enough to remember what it was like before” Roe v. Wade, she said, recalling how, as a member of the California Women’s Parole Board in the 1960s, she had sent women to prison for 10 year sentences for terminating pregnancies. “And they still went back to it because the need was so great.” (Sessions, for his part, coldly armed that he saw Roe as “one of the worst, colossally erroneous Supreme Court decisions of all time.”)

Feinstein’s committee chair was empty by the time the hearing moved on to questions about the potential connections between Russia and the Trump campaign. She had slipped away for surgery to install a pacemaker—a matter of “some urgency,” she told me. “I had to get it done quickly.”