Senator Dianne Feinstein's career was filled with firsts, including first woman mayor of San Francisco and one of two of the first women elected to the U.S. Senate from California.
CA has only elected democratic (vaguely to the left of the median Democrat, if fairly rank-and-file) senators since 1992. As long as she didn’t leave it to chance and die during her term (…) while she coincided with the honestly fairly moderate-but-still-republican Gov Schwarzenegger, she could have had a hand in picking her replacement.
As others (including myself) have noted, any Democrat-led SCOTUS nomination or major piece of Dem legislation would have passed more-or-less the same. I’d be curious if there was some analysis of where a particular Dem Senator from CA was a “swing vote”. Meanwhile now we’re in a vacancy and her missing vote definitely matters (again, thankfully likely with less impact than RBG’s).
CA has only elected democratic (vaguely to the left of the median Democrat, if fairly rank-and-file) senators since 1992. As long as she didn’t leave it to chance and die during her term (…) while she coincided with the honestly fairly moderate-but-still-republican Gov Schwarzenegger, she could have had a hand in picking her replacement.
As others (including myself) have noted, any Democrat-led SCOTUS nomination or major piece of Dem legislation would have passed more-or-less the same. I’d be curious if there was some analysis of where a particular Dem Senator from CA was a “swing vote”. Meanwhile now we’re in a vacancy and her missing vote definitely matters (again, thankfully likely with less impact than RBG’s).