Feinstein builds bridges as Senate peacemaker

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein has gone from party renegade to primary peacemaker in under a year.

On the one hand, she’s been criticized for joining Republicans on several contentious votes, including the most controversial judicial nomination of the 110th Congress.

Yet last month, her simple gesture of lending her living room to Sens. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) helped bring an amicable end to the acrimonious Democratic presidential primary.

For Feinstein (Calif.), it’s all part of the same strategy — seeing government as one nonpartisan system. “That doesn’t mean I have to compromise my values or my views,” Feinstein said in an interview with The Hill. “But it does mean I have to reach out and talk to people and try to put things together.”

Using that approach, Feinstein has become arguably the most influential female senator and one of the most powerful women in American politics. Republicans have praised the former San Francisco mayor for having an open mind, with some suggesting she could fill the shoes of Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), the chamber’s most recognized dealmaker, who is undergoing treatment for a brain tumor.

Yet her willingness to reach across the aisle has not been without consequence. Feinstein has had to defend her votes to some members of her conference and liberal advocacy groups in California.

“She has real character, real courage and real leadership, and that is a vanishing breed in the U.S. Senate,” says former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.).

Lott would know. The chamber was at a stalemate last summer over the confirmation of Leslie Southwick for a federal judgeship in Lott’s home state of Mississippi when Feinstein broke ranks in August to join Judiciary Committee Republicans in confirming the most contentious nominee of the 110th Congress. Feinstein cast the decisive vote in the committee’s 10-9 approval after meeting with the judge at Lott’s request. The former senator says he asked Feinstein to listen to the judge, examine his record, and treat him fairly.

Feinstein again showed her independent streak last fall when she supported Bush nominee Michael Mukasey for attorney general. Feinstein was one of two Democrats to join all nine Republicans in the 11-9 Judiciary Committee vote, despite her Democratic panel colleagues raising concerns about Mukasey’s stance on torture.

Feinstein, who won her fourth Senate term with 59 percent of the vote, said “there’s no question” her independence has created problems with elements of her party. But she studied Southwick’s past carefully and is still following his present performance.

Mukasey was the best alternative, she said, noting that Bush would have sent a less palatable nomination if Mukasey’s confirmation failed. Furthermore, morale was devastated at the Justice Department after Alberto Gonzales’s tenure and the agency was in sore need of leadership, Feinstein said. She emphasizes her continuing attempts to force all government interrogations to abide by Army Field Manual rules that prohibit torture.

Senate Democratic leaders acknowledge the concerns over Feinstein’s 2007 votes. “There was angst, but she was doing what she thought was the right thing,” said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), the other Judiciary Committee member who backed Mukasey. “No one thought there was any bad motivation. Dianne, to her credit, does her own thinking, and sometimes it moves us in a direction we wouldn’t have moved.”

But others went further. Rick Jacobs, a former state campaign chairman for Howard Dean in 2004 and founder of the Courage Campaign, a liberal-leaning, California-based political committee, launched a bid last year to censure Feinstein through the California Democratic Party.

The bid failed. “The Senate is built for compromise, but the flip side is that on key votes like Southwick and Mukasey, sometimes we don’t have a clue what she’s going to do,” Jacobs said.

Feinstein says the majority of Californians do not share that opinion and her Democratic credentials are solid. She repeatedly sided with her party on most judicial nominations, including her opposition to confirm Supreme Court nominees Samuel Alito and John Roberts Jr. She has also been a leading critic of the administration’s interpretation of executive authority and its use of presidential signing statements.

To bolster the point, her staff sent The Hill a five-page e-mail listing her legislative accomplishments for the 110th Congress. It lists more than a dozen bills signed into law that she sponsored, co-sponsored or played an active role in passing.

“There is a liberal-wing segment that wants me to go down the line on everything, and when one or two examples come along when I don’t, they seize on it,” she said. “It’s not representative.”

In June, Feinstein added another accomplishment to her list: helping end the most difficult Democratic presidential primary in 28 years. Feinstein had strongly supported Clinton’s bid to become the first female U.S. president. But Democratic leaders say her hosting the Obama-Clinton meeting was Feinstein at her best, putting her personal allegiance aside in favor of a larger mission.

“She played an important role in our caucus as a peacemaker in bringing them together,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said, “She is a problem-solver, not a partisan person, and she always gives me good advice. She tells me what I need to hear, not what I want to hear.”