California senator Dianne Feinstein, eighty-nine, whose mental decline has long been an open secret, announced her 2024 retirement last week. This comes on the heels of a stinging Sacramento Bee editorial withholding endorsement for her replacement and an accelerating race for her seat.
Senator Feinstein has no public plans to resign. She says she will serve out her full term, preventing an appointment by Governor Gavin Newsom. Efforts to force her out of office early will persist.
When Feinstein ran for the Senate in 2018, she obtained just 54 percent of the primary vote against fellow Democrat Kevin de León, a widely despised figure in California politics, now clinging to his Los Angeles city council seat after being exposed as a cutthroat diversity fraud.
For over a year, with varying degrees of courtesy and self-promotion, three ambitious California representatives have pursued Feinstein’s office. Adam Schiff, sixty-two, and Katie Porter, forty-nine, both Harvard-trained lawyers, talk up democracy but embody an arrogant, insider ruling class. Then there’s Barbara Lee, a seventy-six-year-old from Oakland who also wants the job. Lee’s claim to fame is her casting the single vote against the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Adam Schiff has already garnered Nancy Pelosi’s endorsement. Governor Newsom has passed him over for two appointments, first for Kamala Harris’s Senate seat, and then for state attorney general, a job that Schiff openly sought. Newsom and Schiff are not close.
While Schiff is currently a favored candidate, Democratic primaries bring identity-first and single-interest voters out in swarms. For many of them, white privileged male Adam Schiff is the problem, not the solution. He has alienated the state’s black leaders with his relatively tough anti-crime policies and support of incarceration. The best Schiff can do — and does — is claim Feinstein’s Jewish credentials.
Schiff is a serious and studied lawmaker. But there’s nothing really charming about him: front man for the deep state, errand boy for the Disney Corporation and Donald J. Trump’s would-be nemesis.
Under Pelosi’s tutelage, Schiff rose to national prominence as lead manager in a sketchy House impeachment. Democrats accused Trump of illegal threats to withhold military aid to coerce Ukraine to investigate Biden family grift, and professed “collusion” with Russia in the 2016 election. Upon taking control of the House this year, Republicans removed Schiff from the House Intelligence Committee, where he had been the ranking Democrat.
California carpetbagger Katherine Moore “Katie” Porter, up from Fort Dodge, Iowa, is something else entirely.
A protégé of Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, Porter arrived in suburban Orange County twelve years ago to teach law at University of California, Irvine. She was elected to Congress in 2018. Her ties to, knowledge of, and even interest in the state seem thin to nonexistent. She adheres to Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, student loan forgiveness and other progressive boob bait. She has the brains to know she’s pushing dreck, but what does toxic policy matter when a girl needs a hook to climb up the A-list?
Pelosi’s early endorsement of Schiff possibly reveals the former speaker’s own reservations about the aggressive parvenu. Porter has made enemies among congressional veterans, including Maxine Waters, whom she’s outshone during Financial Services Committee sessions.
Even Porter’s admirers call her style performative. Her brazen stunts — wearing a ghastly Batgirl costume on the House floor was one — suggest antic disregard for her position and an unhealthy need for attention. Playing to the cameras, Porter made vicious accusations of perjury during a 2022 hearing on gun violence and Second Amendment rights, then shouted down her shocked respondent, revealing an inner tyrant.
Buoyed by large campaign donations from outside her district and residual anti-Trump feeling, Porter eked out a re-election win in her plummy Orange County district that includes Newport and Laguna Beach. Whether donors and party operatives will equally support her run for the Senate is an open question. Her range in retail politics seems limited. It’s hard to imagine an ersatz OC soccer mom wowing the state’s welfare dependents and their unionized custodians, or impressing hard-working Central Valley Latinos.
Porter has a penchant for expletives in interviews. From Elle to Vanity Fair, she overshares a stormy private life, presenting herself as a struggling single mom and formerly abused wife who has overcome adversity. The canned shtick sells, and her ex-husband presumably has the decency to keep his side of the story private.
“Porter is best known for lecturing and bullying congressional witnesses, who aren’t in a position to fight back, with faulty arguments on a white board she brings to committee,” says Orange County Register columnist Matthew Fleming in a piece entitled “Anyone but Katie Porter for US Senate in California.”
“Though often inaccurate, these moments make for compelling social media content she uses for online fundraising,” Fleming adds. And that’s what Porter does with genius: hustles money, with many shadowy elves in high places helping her rake it in.
Should Dianne Feinstein not make it to the finish line in 2025, Governor Newsom has the constitutional power to appoint whomever he wants to the post. His last Senate appointment, Alex Padilla, was a sop to Latino voters. If he has the opportunity, he has promised — a fresh, edgy idea, Gavin! — to appoint a black woman to the Senate. This is a gift to Barbara Lee.
In the film version of this grade-C political horror show, Schiff is the beady-eyed Hummer EV salesman in Beverly Hills, doing a hard sell under looming palm trees. Porter enters as the full-bodied Fashion Island dominatrix in big turquoise jewelry. Get me the manager! Now! Then, in a twist, she’s the plucky Sienna-driving mom-warrior and miracle worker fighting Corporate Meanies. As the plot thickens, she turns out to have multiple personalities and grandiosity “issues.”
It’s not a love story, not at all, and the script doctors are still arguing behind closed doors just how Barbara Lee comes in. Is black still box office? the worried producers and accountants ask. The cinematographers simply shrug and say, we can make anything happen.
Between now and the March 2024 primary election, California voters and the rest of the nation will watch an untold number of slick televised “news” stories about a Senate race that is over before it begins, a contest to be conducted largely from Washington’s war rooms and media offices in Manhattan and Los Angeles. The administrative state and its federal gravy train have already won the 2024 California Senate race.
Consolidating a progressive lock on California, the winner barely matters. Three Democratic candidates, pick one, will guard leftist fatuities and protected classes. They will gladly put faction before probity and truth. Behold, come to life, or at least to your living-room wall screen, are the dodgy ambitions and lawmakers that James Madison warned of long ago.
