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Since then, Feinstein has lost as much as she has won. She has lost two husbands to cancer, two colleagues to assassination, and tens of thousands of her city’s residents to the AIDS epidemic. She served on the Board of Supervisors for eight tumultuous years, and she ran and lost two mayoral races before serving as mayor of San Francisco for nine years. She was considered and passed over as a vice-presidential candidate in 1984, lost a California gubernatorial election in 1990, then won six elections to the United States Senate, where she serves as the fifth-most-senior senator.
Feinstein is now both the definition of the American political Establishment and the personification of the inroads women have made over the past 50 years. Her career, launched in a moment of optimism about what women leaders could do for this country, offers a study in what the Democratic Party’s has not been able to do. As Feinstein consolidated her power at the top of the Senate, the party’s losses steadily mounted. It has lost control of the Supreme Court; it is likely about to lose control of Congress. Children are being gunned down by the assault weapons Feinstein has fought to ban, while the Senate — a legislative body she reveres — can only stand by idly, ultimately complicit. States around the nation are banning books about racism as Black people are being shot and killed in supermarkets. Having gutted the Voting Rights Act, conservatives are leveraging every form of voter suppression they can, while the Senate cannot pass a bill to protect the franchise. The expected overturning of Roe v. Wade this summer will mark a profound step backward, a signal that other rights won during Feinstein’s adulthood, including marriage equality and full access to contraception, are just as vulnerable.
As the storied career of one of the nation’s longest-serving Democrats approaches its end, it’s easy to wonder how the generation whose entry into politics was enabled by progressive reforms has allowed those victories to be taken away. And how a woman who began her career with the support of conservationist communities in San Francisco, and who staked her political identity on advancing women’s rights, is now best known to young people as the senator who scolded environmental-activist kids in her office in 2019 and embraced Lindsey Graham after the 2020 confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett, a Supreme Court justice who appears to be the fifth and final vote to end the constitutional right to an abortion. As Feinstein told Graham, “This is one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in.”
For many from a younger and more pugilistic left bucking with angry exasperation at the unwillingness of Feinstein’s generation to make room for new tactics and leadership before everything is lost, the senator is more than simply representative of a failed political generation — she is herself the problem. After she expressed her unwillingness to consider filibuster reform last year, noting that “if democracy were in jeopardy, I would want to protect it, but I don’t see it being in jeopardy right now,” The Nation ran a piece headlined “Dianne Feinstein Is an Embarrassment.”
Feinstein, who turns 89 in June, is older than any other sitting member of Congress. Her declining cognitive health has been the subject of recent reporting in both her hometown San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. It seems clear that Feinstein is mentally compromised, even if she’s not all gone. “It’s definitely happening,” said one person who works in California politics. “And it’s definitely not happening all the time.”
Reached by phone two days after 19 children were murdered in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in late May, Feinstein spoke in halting tones, sometimes trailing off mid-sentence or offering a non sequitur before suddenly alighting upon the right string of words. She would forget a recently posed question, or the date of a certain piece of legislation, but recall with perfect lucidity events from San Francisco in the 1960s. Nothing she said suggested a deterioration beyond what would be normal for a person her age, but neither did it demonstrate any urgent engagement with the various crises facing the nation.
“Oh, we’ll get it done, trust me,” she assured me in reference to meaningful gun reform. Every question I asked — about the radicalization of the GOP, the end of Roe, the failures of Congress — was met with a similar sunny imperviousness, evincing an undiminished belief in institutional power that may in fact explain a lot about where Feinstein and other Democratic leaders have gone wrong. “Some things take longer than others, and you can only do what you can do at a given time,” she said. “That doesn’t mean you can’t do it at another time. And so one of the things that you develop is a certain kind of memory for progress: when you can do something in terms of legislation and have a chance of getting it through, and when the odds are against it, meaning the votes and that kind of thing. So I’m very optimistic about the future of our country.”
It is not a comment on her age to note the sheer amount of history that has determined Dianne Feinstein’s life.
Her father, Leon Goldman, was born in 1904 to Jewish immigrants. Feinstein’s grandfather had fled pogroms in Russian-occupied Poland and had become a shopkeeper in San Francisco, where the family’s lives were upended by the fire that raged after the 1906 earthquake. The family relocated to Southern California, and Feinstein’s grandfather invested in oil wells. Leon would go on to medical school, becoming the first Jewish chair of surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, hospital and a member of San Francisco’s rarefied social circles.
Feinstein’s mother, Betty Rosenburg, fled the Bolshevik Revolution with her czarist Russian Orthodox father, traveling across Siberia by hay cart. She grew up to be a model, and after marrying Goldman and bearing three daughters, she became alcoholic, abusive, and suicidal. She raged and threatened to kill Dianne and her sisters, calling them “kikes” and “little Jews,” and once tried to drown her youngest daughter in a bathtub.
This instability remained a secret in the upscale circles in which Feinstein’s parents moved. Her father was a workhorse, adored by his patients and his eldest daughter; many think she modeled her workaholic habits and insatiable ambitions on his. “Dianne is really Leon Goldman in the garb of a beautiful woman,” one family friend told Roberts.
Raised Jewish, Dianne was nonetheless enrolled as a teen at the exclusive Convent of the Sacred Heart High School in tony Pacific Heights, where she became quite taken with the aesthetics of Catholic ritual and hierarchy. The school was full of processions and teas and ceremonies. Students were required to wear starched uniforms and white gloves. In his book Season of the Witch, San Francisco writer David Talbot reported that young Dianne would occasionally try on a nun’s habit.
Dianne attended Stanford, where she won the highest political position available to female students at the time: the vice-presidency. She got a fellowship the year after her graduation, in 1955, during which she worked on a report about criminal justice in San Francisco. She eloped with the man who would become her first husband and got pregnant, giving birth to her daughter, Katherine, in 1957. Within two years, she would be divorced and a single mother at 26, albeit a very privileged one. In her mid-20s, she briefly entertained the idea of becoming a stage actress, took up sailing, and volunteered for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign. When, in 1961, a San Francisco real-estate developer refused to show a home to a rising-star Black lawyer, Willie Brown, Dianne brought her daughter to a demonstration for Brown and bumped her stroller into Terry Francois, who was the head of the local NAACP. Both Francois and Brown would become close associates.
That same year, California governor Pat Brown, a patient of Dianne’s father’s, offered her a paid job on the California women’s-parole-and-sentencing board. For six years, she had the power to determine sentence length for women who had been convicted of everything from public drunkenness to violent crimes. She took a reformist approach to criminal justice, calling for rehabilitation rather than long sentences in narcotics cases. Francois, who had become the first African American to serve on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, assigned her to an advisory committee on local jails; she reported on the terrible state of the facilities, the inedible food, the overcrowding, the rampant vermin.
As part of her work with the board, she found herself determining sentences for abortion providers. Although she would later strongly support abortion access and often told a story about how, back at Stanford, classmates had passed a plate to pay for a student to travel to Tijuana to end a pregnancy, in the early ’60s the procedure was still illegal in California, and, as she would explain to Roberts, the cases in front of her were “all illegal back-alley abortionists. Many times, the women that they performed an abortion on suffered greatly. I really came to believe that the law is the law.”
Feinstein spoke in halting tones, sometimes trailing off mid-sentence or offering a non sequitur.
Feinstein’s memories of this period remain sharp. “Under the indeterminate-sentence law, most sentences carried a low of maybe six months and a high of ten years,” she told me by phone. “There was one case, her name was Anita Venza. And over and over, she committed abortions on women. I said when we were sentencing her, ‘Anita, why do you continue doing this?’ And she said, ‘I feel so sorry for women in this situation.’ ”
I asked Feinstein whether she had continued to sentence Venza despite this explanation. “Yes.”
But did Feinstein feel for her? “Oh, yes,” she replied. “But she was a dedicated … She was going to continue to do it. There’s no question. She had been in state prison and been paroled and was brought back.”
When I pushed further, asking Feinstein what it felt like now to be on the verge of a future in which providers like Venza could once again be sentenced to prison, and in which the law will once again be the law, she declined to fully acknowledge the chilling implications of the rollback on the near horizon, retreating instead behind impenetrable platitudes. “Well, one thing I have seen in my lifetime is that this country goes through different phases,” she said. “The institutions handling some of these issues have changed for the better. They’ve become more progressive, and I think that’s important.”
Feinstein’s 1969 race for the Board of Supervisors might have found echoes in Ocasio-Cortez’s groundbreaking 2018 campaign, but the differences between the two women’s early paths are stark. Ocasio-Cortez ran a low-budget grassroots campaign out of her small Bronx apartment and was outspent by Joe Crowley, her heavyweight Democratic-primary opponent, 18 to one. Feinstein’s friends-and-family campaign, in contrast, was funded by San Francisco’s elite and entailed auctions of Ansel Adams prints and a free surgery by her father. It was what many believed at the time to be the most expensive campaign in San Francisco’s history.
Like a cartoon of efficient, rule-bound, Tracy Flick–style white femininity, Feinstein promptly threw herself into her role as the head of the board, San Francisco’s city council, transforming it from a part-time civic gig into a full-time study in technocratic control. She got there early and stayed late while her fellow supervisors, who needed actual jobs to support themselves, showed up when they could. “She crafted reams of legislation,” Roberts writes, “convened citizen advisory committees, performed ceremonial functions, demanded reports from bureaucrats.”
Feinstein’s profile grew. She ran for mayor in 1971 and lost, and lost again in 1975, but she retained leadership of the board through the ’70s, when things got weird in San Francisco. She believed in law enforcement and institutional control over the uncontrollable impulses of a city that was undulating with change.
In 1973, San Francisco was ravaged by the so-called Zebra serial killings. The next year, heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, whose members had assassinated the superintendent of the Oakland schools. In 1975, the city’s police went on strike, and there was an assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford when he visited the city. Meanwhile, a group called the New World Liberation Front was connected to more than 70 bombings in Northern California, including at the San Francisco Opera House and the homes of some local executives.
Feinstein and several of her colleagues on the board were warned that they were targets. Packages full of dynamite were delivered to two board members, and in December 1976, when Feinstein was caring for her husband Bert Feinstein, then dying of cancer, a bomb was discovered outside 19-year-old Katherine’s window. It would have killed her except that the temperature had dropped that night, leading the device to misfire. The next year, the windows at Feinstein’s vacation home on Monterey Bay were shot out.
In the fall of 1978, Feinstein traveled to the Himalayas with the man who would become her third husband, financier Dick Blum. While there, she contracted dysentery and was forced to slow down, even as discontent grew on the board; one of Feinstein’s colleagues, a former police officer named Dan White, had become frustrated by money troubles, the policies of liberal mayor George Moscone, and the attention-getting successes of Harvey Milk, a liberal activist from the Castro who, in winning a spot on the board, had become the first openly gay man elected to political office in California. In the days that Feinstein had been at home with her intestinal ailment, White had abruptly quit his seat, then changed his mind and asked to be reinstated.
Feinstein advised Moscone to let him have his job back. But Milk despised White, telling the mayor that he would only impede his liberal agenda. Moscone eventually agreed with Milk and denied White’s request to be reinstated. On the morning of November 27, 1978, Feinstein, back to work for the first day after her trip and her illness, had been asked by Moscone to look out for an agitated White and calm him. Casually speaking to reporters as the board waited for the appointment of White’s replacement, she said that she would not be running a third mayoral campaign. While in Nepal, she had decided to leave politics.
“It’s important to remember that she thought her career was over before it even began,” said Cleve Jones, the labor and gay-rights activist who in 1978 was Milk’s student intern. “It was a very polarized city and she, as a moderate, felt there was no place for her. So she was going to give up politics.”
At around 10:30 a.m., Dan White entered through a basement window of City Hall and went to meet the mayor. Afterward, Feinstein heard her former colleague rushing by her. She couldn’t have known he had already shot and killed Moscone. “Dan,” she called to him. “I have something to do first,” White told her as he asked Milk to come into his office.
Feinstein heard the door of White’s office slam and someone shout, “Oh, no!” Then she heard shots and saw White running out of his office. When she entered, she found Milk’s body on the floor, surrounded by blood and brain matter. She reached down to take her colleague’s pulse and put her finger straight into the bullet hole on Milk’s wrist.
Jones arrived to find City Hall in chaos. “Dianne came rushing past me,” he said, “and I could see her hands and sleeves were stained with blood, and then I saw Harvey’s feet sticking out of Dan White’s office. It was the first time I’d ever seen a dead body.” Jones added, “There were many times when she and I disagreed, but I’ve always felt I share a bond with her that kind of transcends all this other stuff, because of what we both witnessed and how that day completely and absolutely transformed our lives.”
Feinstein, her tan suit covered in Milk’s blood, composed though in obvious shock, told the crowd at City Hall that Moscone and Milk had been killed and that the suspect was former supervisor Dan White. As the head of the Board of Supervisors, she then became San Francisco’s first female mayor.
Feinstein has maintained that her devotion to centrism was born of the tumult that led to her rise. “It was as if the world had gone mad,” Feinstein writes in Nine and Counting, a 2000 book about the nine women then serving in the U.S. Senate, describing her decisions to pursue the job of interim mayor in the wake of the assassinations and to run for reelection less than two years later. “The city needed to be reassured that there would be some consistency as we put the broken pieces back together … From that nonpartisan experience, I drew my greatest political lesson — the heart of political change is at the center of the political spectrum.”
This does not mean that Feinstein is a centrist, ideologically speaking. She has a solidly Democratic voting record and has occasionally taken positions progressively ahead of her party, though in other instances she has practically acted as a Republican. If she has hopscotched around the middle, it’s because she believes stability and progress — “the heart of political change” — flow from strong, functioning institutions built on consensus. It made Feinstein an odd fit for San Francisco in the late ’70s. As Talbot wrote, “San Franciscans had a fondness for lovable rogues and other colorful characters. But in a city of Marx Brothers, Feinstein was Margaret Dumont, forever distressed and befuddled by the antics around her.” In the wake of the assassinations, however, she became “precisely the right leader for the time.”
In her nine years as mayor of San Francisco, she grew ever more convinced that the balm for social upheaval and partisan protest was a tightening of civic authority. She inaugurated weekly meetings of city department heads, where the police chief always presented first. Just as she had taken to the starched clothes and white gloves and ceremonial displays of order at her Catholic school, Feinstein took up the aesthetics of local governance. She kept a fire turnout coat in the trunk of her car and would appear at blazes dressed like a firefighter; she was photographed in a custom-cut police uniform holding an emergency call radio and would listen to the police scanner while being driven around the city in her limousine.
Her mayoralty would overlap with the worst of the AIDS crisis. On this issue, too, her approach was to seek a middle path by giving and taking in turns. While on the Board of Supervisors, she had cast the deciding vote in support of Willie Brown’s legislation legalizing all private sex acts between consenting adults and proposed an ordinance to ban hiring or job discrimination against gays and lesbians — the first of its kind in the nation. But Feinstein had also spearheaded prim anti-pornography campaigns, and in her early years as mayor, she declined to sign a bill recognizing same-sex partnerships — despite offering her backyard for a same-sex commitment ceremony. She also provoked the fury of gay residents by closing the city’s bathhouses.
“I’m a very far-left union organizer and queer radical,” said Jones. “And buddies and I would go to a bathhouse and sit in that big Jacuzzi and conspire to drive Dianne nuts.” But, he added, “I remember talking with someone about how she was really walking a tightrope, the compassion she showed for people with HIV at a time of incredible stigma and misinformation and hysteria.” Jones’s appraisal is echoed in Randy Shilts’s defining account of the era, And the Band Played On, in which he notes that “of all the big-league Democrats in the United States, Feinstein was undoubtedly the most consistently pro-gay voice.”
Yet decades later she stayed away from the front lines of the movement for marriage equality. In 2004, she would publicly lambaste then-Mayor Gavin Newsom for issuing marriage licenses to gay couples in San Francisco, which she was sure provoked a conservative backlash that helped George W. Bush win reelection. “The whole issue has been too much, too fast, too soon,” Feinstein said after the 2004 election, betraying her tactical distrust of explosive social change. (She has since said that she was wrong on this.)
“It’s not just being in the middle so you can get votes in Fresno as well as Berkeley,” said Jones. “It’s that she believes in the power of the system to protect and manage. She’s all about order.”
After losing a 1990 bid for California governor, Feinstein ran for a vacant Senate seat in 1992. She, fellow Californian Barbara Boxer, Illinois’s Carol Moseley Braun, and Washington’s Patty Murray all won their races that year, doubling the number of women in the Senate (there had never before been more than two serving at one time). It was dubbed “the Year of the Woman,” part of an election cycle fueled by outrage over the treatment of Anita Hill at Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings in 1991, in which the all-white, all-male character of the Senate Judiciary Committee had been put on miserable display.
Even during that 1992 race, Feinstein’s willingness to adopt established norms was evident. “Pundits would remark that if there was a model for a woman senator, it would look like Feinstein,” recalled Rose Kapolczynski, who ran Boxer’s 1992 campaign. “In other words, a woman who looked and acted like male senators looked and acted.”
Still, it is hard to convey to those who have grown up in a world in which Feinstein and Boxer and Murray and Braun were the system, in which Hillary Clinton was considered, twice, the inevitable next president, in which Kamala Harris (the successor to Boxer’s California Senate seat) is now the vice-president, exactly what the victories of Feinstein and other women in her freshman class represented.
“I danced in the streets,” remembered the writer Rebecca Solnit, a longtime San Franciscan. “On Castro Street specifically, with lots of gay men, during the great 1992 election that brought Boxer and Feinstein into office. Feinstein feels like a bridge to me, a fixed point in the landscape that helped us cross out of the old, worse world, in which women were not senators.” But, she added, “we have traveled a long way from that bridge now.”
By its mere presence, the new cohort of women lawmakers was supposed to change how things worked in Congress or at least give the appearance of change. That function was made explicit to Feinstein and Braun, who were asked to do representational repair work on the Judiciary Committee.
“I walked away from that hearing convicted in the determination that I was gonna get women on that committee,” Joe Biden, who as committee chair notoriously failed to defend Hill from Republican attacks, says in the 2007 documentary 14 Women. “And I called Dianne.”
If women changed the Senate’s image, they did not always change its character. Political representation is a funny thing. The absence of women and minorities from governing institutions is ghoulish. But the seemingly obvious remedy — putting those people in power — can often involve new participants simply recapitulating the standards set by those who preceded them.
When Feinstein started in the Senate, she enforced its dress code, which reflected her own pearl-wearing respectability: No pantsuits for female staffers; they had to wear skirts or dresses. But even as Senate rules relaxed, Feinstein kept her standards intact. As recently as 2017 it was reported that women in her office were required to wear stockings and skirts of a certain length. Her very first speech on the Senate floor was in support of Bill Clinton’s landmark passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, but when it came to the leave policy in her own office, she was behind the curve. In 2014, Feinstein’s office provided only six weeks of paid family leave, half of what many younger senators were offering both new mothers and fathers. (It’s 12 weeks now.)
Feinstein is, by multiple accounts, a terrifying boss to work for, famously stealing the old line “I don’t get ulcers; I give them.” During her race for governor in 1990, former employees, according to author Celia Morris, “called her imperious, hectoring and even abusive, claiming that she would dress down a hapless victim in front of others and would neither apologize nor admit it if she proved to be mistaken.” Within six months of her arrival in the Senate, 14 of her aides had departed (compared to three for Boxer), with 11 quitting and three fired.
Feinstein’s expectations of her staff have consistently remained sky-high. She has all of her aides — around 70 people — compile a two-to-four-page report of everything they did during the week, every week. Over the weekend, Feinstein reads them and then quizzes individuals on their reports in all-staff Monday meetings. Some saw these gatherings as democratizing. Others found them to be a tortured study in hierarchical protocols. Multiple former staffers spoke of the strict seating arrangements, with senior staffers around a middle table in a giant conference room, their aides in seats in a ring behind their bosses, and the most junior people standing at the periphery. “Everyone there had to be prepared, no issue too big or too small,” said one aide from the 1990s. “So it could be, ‘What is happening with the foreign-aid package?’ Or it could be, ‘I’m looking at a report of how many incoming letters we had and how many outgoing, and why is there such a backlog in responses?’ ”
Feinstein is a terrifying boss to work for, famously stealing the old line “I don’t get ulcers; I give them.”
“If you weren’t good at responding to that kind of Socratic interrogation technique, she didn’t make your job easy,” said the aide. “On the other hand, do I admire a senator who was as focused on how fast constituents got responses as she was on a foreign-aid package? I sure did.”
When a staffer left, if Feinstein liked them and they had served for a long time, she would give them prints of the still lifes she draws. If they were less special to her or had served briefly, she would give them a watch with her signature across its face. It could be difficult to leave her employment, several former staffers told me; she understood it as a slight. One former aide who took another job on the Hill remembered Feinstein saying, “It’s really unfortunate you are leaving; you had great potential.” When new people arrived in Feinstein’s employ, colleagues would surreptitiously hand them Jerry Roberts’s biography, with its details about her troubled, privileged childhood and her political coming of age in the crucible of San Francisco, with a whispered “Read this; it will all make sense.”
When stories have run about her bad behavior, Feinstein has shrugged them off. “When a man is strong, it is expected. When a woman is, it is not,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. And she told her biographer, “When people act independently of the head figure, it causes conflicts. You can’t let staff run you. The person in charge has to be the guiding post.”
From the moment Feinstein got to the Senate, she embraced its rituals and practices, the clubby procedural stuff that at one time brought senators from competing parties together with a sense of their own power and responsibility — and sometimes even enabled them to get things done. “She is a model senator,” said Jeffrey Millman, who managed her 2018 campaign. “She loves this work, and she is really good at it.” But as with so much of her career, Feinstein’s record in the Senate is a mash of righteous fights and dispiriting capitulation, her ideological positioning scattered and her aims pragmatic, geared toward the goal of firm governance above all else.
As a young person reporting on California prisons, Feinstein fervently opposed capital punishment, but in 2004, she created an extremely awkward scene by going off script and making a call for the death penalty at the funeral of murdered police officer Isaac Espinoza. (More recently, challenged from the left, Feinstein has returned to her anti-death-penalty stance.)
She told me in our conversation that the institutions meting out criminal justice have become more progressive in the 60 years since she was on the sentencing board. But that’s not actually true, mostly because the kind of bipartisan cooperation Feinstein values so highly has centered on the expansion of a carceral state, via legislation like the 1994 crime bill authored by Joe Biden and supported strenuously by Feinstein.
When it comes to foreign policy, Feinstein has been a hawkish defender of drone strikes and expanded surveillance, calling Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing “an act of treason.” But the pinnacle of her career was her damning 6,700-page report from 2014, which she commissioned as the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, taking on the CIA’s role in torturing terrorism suspects during the Bush years. In the words of one California political operative, “she was practically melting witnesses with her eyes, just having this steel-trap mind and asking for more details.” It was a moment when even progressive Californians could feel a sense of pride in their unapologetically moderate senator, who may have seen in the CIA’s brutality a breach of the norms she believes in so fervently.
As George Shultz, the former secretary of State, told the New Yorker’s Connie Bruck in 2015, “Dianne is not really bipartisan so much as nonpartisan.” Her devotion is to the system, in which laws are made, regulations are implemented, and oversight is prized. She is stalwart in her conviction that the way to make progress is to maintain open, friendly lines of communication with members of the opposition party, a stance that her defenders argue is crucial to getting anything accomplished in the Senate.
Describing the Ten-in-Ten Fuel Economy legislation passed in 2007 by Feinstein and several colleagues, which ensured that emissions standards grew ten miles per gallon in ten years, Millman said, “Could it have been 20 miles per gallon? Yes, but then the few Republicans wouldn’t have signed on to it, and it wouldn’t have been a law; it would have been a regulation. And when Trump came into power, he could simply have undone it.”
She is probably most famous for her push, as soon as she got into the Senate, for an assault-weapons ban. She had been spoiling for this fight for decades; back when she was mayor of San Francisco, her controversial ban on handguns provoked a recall campaign (she survived it). In 1993, Idaho Republican Larry Craig challenged her by saying, “The gentlelady from California needs to become a little bit more familiar with firearms and their deadly characteristics.” In response, Feinstein said, “I am quite familiar with firearms. I became mayor as a product of assassination. I found my assassinated colleague and put a finger through a bullet hole trying to get a pulse. I was trained in the shooting of a firearm when I had terrorist attacks, with a bomb in my house, when my husband was dying, when I had windows shot out. Senator, I know something about what firearms can do.”
The assault-weapons ban passed in 1994 as part of the crime bill; its 2004 expiration marked the start of our infernal era of near-daily mass shootings. On this issue, Feinstein has been receptive to the activist politics of a younger generation. She appeared in San Francisco with teenage demonstrators in 2018’s March for Our Lives. The footage is kind of heartbreaking from a generational perspective: crowds full of kids who have no idea who the ancient woman on the stage is, what she has lived through, that she has spent decades fighting the battle that has, horrifically, now become theirs.
Feinstein implored her colleagues to act after the murders of 20 schoolchildren in Sandy Hook in 2012: “Show some guts,” she said. She told the New York Times that one reason the Senate could no longer pass an assault-weapons ban was the rising abuse of the filibuster. Of course, Feinstein has been unwilling to commit to ending it.
She acknowledges to me that politics have “hardened” around gun laws in recent decades, saying that “everything has become more partisan than it was when I came to the Senate. When I came to the Senate, Bob Dole was the leader, and he stood up and said … What was it? Tom, help me, what was the quote?” Her aide Tom Mentzer filled in that Dole had agreed that the gun issue was too important to filibuster and put it to a vote.
When I suggest to Feinstein that the partisan hardening has been asymmetrical, that her Republican colleagues have grown more radical and rigid while she and many of her fellow Democratic leaders have been all too willing to compromise, she responded, “Well, yes. I think that’s not inaccurate. I think it’s an accurate statement. What did you first say about Democrats moving?” I repeated that it was the right that has gotten more inflexible while the Democrats have been willing to cede ground.
“I’m not sure,” she responded. “But it’s different; there’s no question about it. And I think there is much more party control. When I came to the Senate, we spoke out, and we learned the hard way, and we took action, and it was clear what was happening with weapons in the country. It still is. And in a way, the weapon issue was a good one because we were able to pass the first bill. When was it, Tom?” Mentzer reminded her that the assault-weapons ban was passed in 1994.
When I asked her about her stated commitment to centrism as a reaction to the tumult of her early political life, she began speaking, unprompted, about Dan White, clearly still appalled by his violent transgressions against the respectability politics that have helped her navigate the world. “A former young, handsome police officer who goes in and kills the mayor,” she said. It was the kind of incident that should grab the government’s notice and compel it to “try to fix those things which are wrong.” But the ultimate lesson she derived from the response to Milk’s murder possesses an almost Olympian complacency: “I think one great thing about a democracy is that there is always flexibility, newcomers always can win and play a role, and it’s a much more open political society, that I see, than I hear of in many other countries.”
From her youth, Feinstein has been an institutionalist, with an institutionalist’s respect for structure, management, and hierarchy as means to manage the rabble of activism and protest. She seems unable to appreciate the possibility that partisan insurgents have overrun those institutions themselves. The crowds who came through the door with battering rams in January 2021 looking to kill a vice-president surely had chilling echoes for Feinstein, but days later, in the name of the Senate, she was defending Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley — a man who had offered up a sign of solidarity to the insurrectionists — in their attempts to delegitimize the election of Joe Biden.
“I think the Senate is a place of freedom,” she told reporters. “And people come here to speak their piece, and they do, and they provide a kind of leadership. In some cases, it’s positive; in some cases, maybe not. A lot of that depends on who’s looking and what party they are.”
“She’s like Charlie Brown and the football,” said Dahlia Lithwick, Slate’s senior legal analyst, describing Feinstein’s unstinting belief that her institution is still functional. “But she doesn’t see that the whole football field is on fire.”
Long before Feinstein sealed the deal with her embrace of Graham, she and her senior colleagues on the Judiciary Committee were criticized for being passive as Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat from the Democrats. When Republicans crisscrossed the country bragging about holding on to Antonin Scalia’s seat after his death, Democrats did nothing. When Trump appointed the staunch conservative Neil Gorsuch, Lithwick said there was “a little chatter about boycotting the hearings,” but then Democrats “went ahead and had the hearing and confirmed him.”
Feinstein’s belief in the Senate’s sanctity may mean that the enduring moment of her career will not be the assault-weapons ban or her grilling of CIA torturers but that awkward, notorious embrace of Graham. In seeking refuge in government institutions as the shield against instability and insurrection, Feinstein has been unable to discern that it was her peers in government — in their suits, on the dais, in the Senate, on the Judiciary Committee — who were laying siege to democracy, rolling back protections, packing the court with right-wingers, and building a legal infrastructure designed to erase the progress that facilitated the rise of her generation of politicians. But this is who she has always been.
Of that “appalling moment” with Graham, Cleve Jones recalled thinking, “Oh my goodness, you just really cling to this notion of civility and bipartisan discourse. One can marvel at it. But it’s genuine. It’s the core of her.”
The Senate rewards its longest-serving members with power. The most dynamic freshman senator in the world would not have the influence that a senior senator does, which is part of the pernicious trap that has created the bipartisan gerontocracy under which we now wither.
As the senior senator from California on the Appropriations Committee, the temptation to stay forever is great, not just for selfish reasons but for the good of her state. “If we lost her seniority … every other state benefits from California not having seniority, because our appropriations are so much larger,” said Millman.
She has the conviction, held by some in their later years, that she knows better. This is the woman who helped to create Joshua Tree National Park but who also spoke dismissively to the youth activists from the Sunrise Movement who came to her office in 2019, telling them they didn’t understand how laws are made. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” she said to the group, insisting, “I know what I’m doing.” But now, with age and all its attendant authority and power, comes serious diminishment.
Multiple reports of her failing memory have been rumbling through Washington, D.C. In 2021, Chuck Schumer removed her from that ranking role on the Judiciary Committee. The Chronicle reported that “the senator is guided by staff members much more than her colleagues are,” a remarkable change for someone who once said, “You can’t let staff run you.” I had let Feinstein’s staff know in advance that I would be asking her about her record on gun reform, and early in our conversation it was clear that Feinstein had come prepared with notes. “The overwhelming statistic is that we have had 200-plus mass shootings so far in 2022, 230 people have been killed, and 840 injured. These are things that we wanted you to hear,” she said, before adding, “So I have this on a card, but I think those are key features.” The acknowledgment of the card felt like a point of pride: She wanted me to know she was sharp enough to know I was sharp enough to know.
That Feinstein may be wrestling with dementia is in fact among the most sympathetic things about her. Getting very old can be hard, lonely; her third husband died of cancer this spring. It is pretty awful now to watch her tell CNN’s Dana Bash, in 2017, that she will stay in office because “it’s what I’m meant to do, as long as the old bean holds up” — and put her finger to her head.
Why didn’t she decline yet another six-year term in 2018 or earlier, when it was perhaps clear that the old bean was not really holding up as she had hoped? Her defenders will lay out all the reasons that retiring in 2017 didn’t make sense, including simply that she won. “Is a diminished Senator Feinstein better than a junior California senator?” asked one of her former staffers. “I would argue, emphatically, yes.” Feinstein’s office released a statement that read in part, “If the question is whether I’m an effective senator for 40 million Californians, the record shows that I am.”
It is also true that she works among plenty of colleagues who are dumb as a box of hammers and have been so since their youth. “I’ve worked in politics my whole life,” said Jones, “and met a lot of politicians who are little more than cardboard cutouts propped up by staff. It’s important to understand that she was never that person.”
But the fact that many of her colleagues, on their best days, are less acute than Feinstein on her worst is exactly the kind of dismal, institutionally warped logic that has left us governed by eldercrats who will not live long enough to have to deal with the consequences of their failures. Feinstein’s defenders argue that there is something gendered about focusing on her overextended tenure, especially when the history of the Senate includes Strom Thurmond, who retired at 100 and was basically not sentient by the end. Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy and Mitch McConnell are all in their 80s. Joe Biden first got to the Senate in 1973, and he’s the president of the United States. But being no worse than Strom Thurmond was not the standard to which we were supposed to aspire at this juncture. And while it may indeed be feminist heresy to expect more from women, in fairness, some of those women told us to expect more from them. They were the ones who cast their own elections as the dawn of a new era. They were the ones who argued that every generation does better than the one before.
Indeed, what may be producing the anger at this generation of Democrats is not just ageism, sexism, or the correct apprehension that America’s governing structures incentivize officials to hold on to power sometimes until they literally die. It is also the smug assuredness with which Democratic leaders, in whatever state of infirmity, can still confidently, in the summer of 2022, tell us to trust them and see themselves as a bulwark against the ruin that is so evidently our present and near future.
Perhaps the progress made over several decades in the middle of the 20th century gave Feinstein and her peers an idealized sense of the nation’s institutions as pliable and always improving. She could urge patience and civility because so many structural exclusions had begun to give way. “Women have really grown to the position where their capability is enormous,” she told me. “I see this with great pride: when women come in who are major officers in our military, in uniform, talking about a given problem, and they are articulate, they’re committed, and they make change. And so this is a day that we should not be disappointed in. It’s a day where, if you look back 50 years, it was very different. But progress has been made, and progress will continue to be made. I’m absolutely convinced of that.”
But those articulate women in the uniforms Feinstein fetishizes got there in part because of the social and political upheavals Feinstein has strained so hard to quell. The gains made by women and people of color and gays and lesbians and trans people and immigrants were extracted by force from a system that had been built to exclude them. To be on the side of the system in the wake of victories wrenched from that system was not to be at the center. It wasn’t moderate. It wasn’t neutral.
Feinstein doesn’t subscribe to this reading of American democracy. She believes those at the top of institutions can help those at the bottom get what they want. But American government has become less democratic in the same years that she and her peers have risen to lead it. A majority of Americans want gun control, but the Senate, whose arcane rules Feinstein still submits to, will not allow it. They want abortion rights, but the Court, which was stolen by Feinstein’s Republican friends, is poised to ensure that those rights are erased.
There is a great story in Roberts’s biography about how when Feinstein was on the Board of Supervisors, she got word that the headmistress of her old school, Sacred Heart, had been arrested protesting on behalf of farmworkers with Cesar Chavez. That headmistress, Sister Mary Mardel, told Roberts about how her former pupil had called the jail to speak to her. “Sister, what are you doing in jail?” Feinstein had asked her in alarm. “What about all the white gloves?”
A child lights candles at a memorial for the victims of a May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 21 people, mostly children. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)
The 59%-to-35% margin is the widest in favor of controlling gun violence recorded in a decade in the Marist poll, though the numbers are similar to what Marist has found over the last four years since the Parkland, Fla., school shooting.
As expected, the new poll finds a sharp partisan divide — 92% of Democrats and 54% of independents say it's more important to control gun violence, while 70% of Republicans say it's more important to protect gun rights.
Notably, however, 56% of gun owners say it is more important to curb gun violence than protect gun rights.
The survey of 1,063 adults was conducted May 31 through June 6 and has a margin of error of +/- 4.3 percentage points. (The Uvalde shooting took place May 24.) There were 977 registered voters interviewed. Where voters are referred to, answers have a +/- 4.5 percentage point margin of error. The survey was conducted with live callers, who interviewed respondents via landline and cellphone. Results were balanced to reflect 2019 U.S. Census estimates for age, gender, income, race and region.
About three-quarters of respondents said mass shootings make them more likely to vote in November. Democrats are almost 20 points more likely to say so than Republicans and independents (84%, vs. 65% for Republicans and 66% for independents).
Majorities of voters said they would definitely vote for candidates who want to increase mental health funding (86%), require stricter background checks (82%), support red flag laws (74%), want stricter gun laws generally (60%) and ban assault-style weapons, like AK-47s and AR-15s (56%).
But when it comes to independents, they are split on an assault-style weapons ban — 48% said they would definitely not vote for a candidate who wants a ban, and 45% said they would.
Red flag laws allow police or family members to request that a judge temporarily remove guns from a person who may be a danger to others or themselves. They have passed in multiple states, but there isn't a federal version of such a law.
Bipartisan gun-control negotiations on Capitol Hill include debate over this kind of a law. The talks aren't focused on broader measures, like universal background checks or banning assault-style weapons, as most Republicans are opposed.
On a measure championed by gun rights activists, just 38% said they would definitely vote for a candidate who wants to allow teachers to carry guns. Fewer — 27% — said they would for a candidate who receives contributions from the National Rifle Association.
There's a notable partisan split here with 8 in 10 Democrats saying they would vote against a candidate who supports letting teachers carry guns, but 7 in 10 Republicans would vote for that candidate.
It's similar when it comes to NRA contributions, with 8 in 10 Democrats saying they would definitely vote against someone who receives them, but 6 in 10 Republicans saying the opposite.
And independents again largely split on both questions with many unsure.
Biden's approval continues to suffer
Even though voters say they are in favor of many gun laws Democratic elected leaders are pushing for, President Biden does not appear to be benefiting.
Biden's approval is at its lowest point in the Marist poll since taking office, at just 38%.
There are major warning signs here for the White House, as not only do a whopping 93% of Republicans disapprove of the job he's doing, but so do 58% of independents, and only 77% of Democrats approve.
What's more, Biden continues to suffer from a lack of intensity among his base. Respondents were nearly three times as likely to strongly disapprove of Biden's job performance (40%) than strongly approve (14%).
These numbers show Biden has become a polarizing figure who is not firing up his base.
It's perhaps not surprising, however, with gas prices up and inflation continuing to rise. Pocketbook issues in politics often take precedence over almost anything else — and voters tend to blame the president when they are feeling the pinch.
If Roe v Wade is overturned, Florida is poised to become an abortion destination. But is DeSantis eyeing a total ban? (photo: Getty)
If Roe v Wade is overturned, the state is poised to become an abortion destination. But is DeSantis eyeing a total ban?
There are people who desperately wanted a child and then found out at 16 weeks pregnant that they would give birth to a baby with devastating health problems – at least one, he recalls, who would have been born without functioning lungs. There are those who had a plan, a partner who would raise a child with them, before they were left on their own. There are patients who drove six hours to get here, who couldn’t get here sooner because rent was due or a kid fell sick. Some just needed a few extra weeks to pull together a few hundred dollars.
And there are the children – 13- or 14-year-olds who didn’t know how to tell their parents. There are even younger kids who didn’t realize they were pregnant because they had never had regular periods before. The youngest patient Miller treated was 11.
Miller, a 75-year-old OB/GYN, sees patients two to three days a week here at A Woman’s Choice, the abortion clinic where he has worked since 2001. He’s the only doctor at this clinic who provides abortions all the way up to 20 weeks of pregnancy, a medical service that is legal in most of the country but that, due to stigma and the threats of violence against physicians, fewer and fewer doctors provide.
Anti-abortion protesters have picketed his house. After Miller’s wife died, a deliveryman once asked him if it was punishment for the work Miller does.
But as a physician, he says, this is his duty.
“People want to judge me because I do abortions, and they’re talking about morality. But as far as I’m concerned, morality cannot be legislated,” he said. “I look at every patient as someone who has a problem or a concern or a reason that, if I can help, that’s what I’m going to do.”
On 1 July, Florida will begin enforcing a law banning abortions for people past 15 weeks of pregnancy. The ban, which has no exceptions for rape or incest, has been framed by its backers as a “moderate” compromise. The vast majority of abortions take place within the first trimester, which ends at 12 weeks, they note. The law is less stringent than the six-week bans and total prohibitions being passed across the country in anticipation of the supreme court overturning Roe v Wade, which guaranteed the right to an abortion, later this summer.
Still, the 15-week ban, which has no medical rationale as a particular endpoint for access, represents a tremendous shift in Florida. The ripple effects could extend far outside of the state’s borders.
Abortions are legal up until 24 weeks in the state, which has more than 60 clinics. If, as expected, Roe is overturned, Florida will become a critical access point. The state, particularly its northeastern region with its cluster of clinics, will offer the most viable option for finding a safe, legal abortion for places such as South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana – all of which are poised to ban abortions, either entirely or for patients beyond six weeks of pregnancy.
Here in Jacksonville, only an hour from the Georgia border, patients already cross over frequently from other states to get care. Staff at A Woman’s Choice are anticipating the number of out-of-state patients to surge in the coming months. And they expect that, as people travel farther for care, more will show up later into pregnancy – making a 15-week deadline that much harder to meet.
With the end of Roe in sight, anti-abortion activists are energized, pressing Governor Ron DeSantis to go further in restricting abortion. So far, the governor – a rising star in the Republican party who is widely believed to be considering a 2024 presidential run – has been noncommittal. Incoming leaders in the state legislature have indicated openness to passing a total ban on the procedure when they reconvene next spring.
Miller believes it’s only a matter of time before abortion is inaccessible in Florida.
“I’m scared of the 15-week ban. But it’s not my greatest fear,” he said. “My biggest fear is the fact that, if they overturn Roe v Wade, the first thing DeSantis would do is try to ban abortion here.”
Supporters of the 15-week ban have argued that only a small number of people will be affected. The state’s health department data shows that in 2021, when it recorded 79,817 abortions, slightly over 6% of that total – 4,850 people – were for people in their second trimester of pregnancy. The state doesn’t specifically collect data on abortions performed for people at 15 weeks and later.
But the number of abortions performed in the second trimester appears to be growing, at least at A Woman’s Choice. Terry Salas Merritt, a consultant who has worked with the clinic for six years, estimated that last year 10% of the patients they saw sought abortions in the second trimester. Since January, the percentage of people seeking abortions after 12 weeks has doubled.
Now, close to one in five of the clinic’s patients are getting abortions in the second trimester. A significant chunk of those are past 15 weeks, according to Kelly Flynn, CEO of A Woman’s Choice. Neither Flynn nor Merritt can fully explain why there has been an uptick, but both suspect that people are having more trouble pulling together the money for an abortion, which can cost hundreds of dollars at a minimum.
“For everything in the universe, costs are higher: for gas, for childcare, for anything and everything. And rents are going up,” Merritt said. “Any disposable income that you had for emergencies – that got depleted. So it takes more time.”
Patients have been coming here from Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina. When, last September, Texas began enforcing its six-week abortion ban, a handful of patients made the trek to Florida.
If Roe is overturned, those numbers will surge. Alabama has an abortion ban on its books that predates 1973. Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana have passed trigger laws that will ban abortion almost entirely. Georgia has a six-week ban on its books that would probably soon be enforced. For patients in each of those states, Florida – with its extensive clinic options – will represent one of the safest and closest options. The next best are North Carolina, seven hours to Jacksonville’s north, or, for some Texans and most Oklahomans, clinics in Kansas.
But patients who need to travel will probably be later in pregnancy by the time they can get an abortion appointment, noted Elizabeth Nash, who tracks state policy for the Guttmacher Institute.
”If you think that a 15-week ban is some kind of compromise, that’s a mistaken idea,” Nash said. “Because what abortion restrictions have done, and the stigma on abortion has done, is create delays, which just push people later into pregnancy before they can access care.”
Flynn is working to hire more staff so that the clinic is not overwhelmed when Roe is overturned. A Woman’s Choice is trying to build out capacity in other ways, too, creating networks of volunteers who can house people who will travel from out of state for an abortion, and setting up carpools and ride-shares so they don’t need to raise as much money for gas.
Local abortion funds are taking similar steps. Julia DeSangles, the co-executive director for Florida Access Network, said her fund is preparing to send Floridians past 15 weeks to North Carolina, to Washington DC, and even to Colorado. And they’re raising money so that they can support the anticipated increase in patients relying on Florida for care.
But Florida Access Network has already struggled to meet patients’ needs. Last year, the total amount of money people sought from them approached half a million dollars, DeSangles said. They were able to provide only a fraction of that – close to $40,000.
In Florida, the nation will see one of the most potent tests of whether Republicans can, in fact, find a middle ground between restrictions and total bans.
Historically, stringent abortion restrictions haven’t been a sure political winner in Florida. As recently as a year ago, an effort to ban abortions at 20 weeks of pregnancy couldn’t even make it out of a committee hearing. Abortion is protected in the state: in 1989, the state’s supreme court ruled that Florida’s constitution guaranteed the right to an abortion, an extension of its right to privacy.
Even now, restrictions don’t appear popular. A poll conducted in May from Florida Atlantic University found that about 66.7% of Floridians believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Just under half of that – 31.8% of all respondents – said they wanted abortion legal in all cases. Polling from the University of North Florida released in February found that 57% of registered voters did not support the state’s new 15-week ban, which passed the legislature in March and was signed into law in mid-April.
But DeSantis’ political aspirations are likely to push him in favor of backing more restrictions, noted Michael Binder, a political science professor and pollster at the University of North Florida who has tracked public opinion regarding the state’s 15-week ban. While abortion bans aren’t popular across the state, they are uniformly backed by Florida Republicans.
If DeSantis hopes to be president, he will face pressure from Republican primary voters across the country to show he has fought against abortion access, Binder said. While both liberal and conservative Democrats oppose abortion restrictions, about 60% of Republican-leaning voters believe abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, according to data compiled by the Pew Research Center. Conservative Republicans are more likely to back bans: 72% believe abortion should be illegal in most or all cases.
When asked about any plans for future abortion bans, DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw directed the 19th to previous remarks about the 15-week ban specifically and stated that the governor “has always been pro-life”.
DeSantis is up for reelection this fall. But after November, the next election on his horizon probably won’t be statewide – it will be the Republican presidential primary.
With that in mind, Binder said, he fully expects the governor and legislature to seriously consider a law banning abortions at six weeks of pregnancy, if not altogether.
Planned Parenthood has sued to stop the 15-week ban from going into effect, arguing that it violates the state supreme court’s ruling protecting abortion rights. The lawsuit was filed in a state circuit court, but is expected to be appealed to Florida’s state supreme court – which has shifted to the right in recent years. Three of its seven members were appointed by DeSantis; a fourth was appointed by former governor Rick Scott, now a Republican senator.
Florida’s political observers and abortion rights experts suspect that, when the time comes, the state supreme court will use a 15-week ban case to overturn Florida’s abortion rights guarantee.
That future is hard to visualize from inside A Woman’s Choice. Miller is one of three physicians who works here and the only one who performs abortions up to 20 weeks. One other sees patients up to 16 weeks, and the third goes to 12. On clinic days, Miller sees between a dozen and 16 patients.
He worries most, he said, about the people who look like him – Black people, who in America have persistently higher rates of pregnancy-related death than white people.
“What are you going to do about them? If you don’t see them until after 15 weeks? What are you going to do for them?” he asked. “Nothing.”
The show trial against British citizens Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner, as well as Moroccan citizen Ibrahim Saadun, was rushed through by Russian proxies in less than three days. (photo: Reuters)
The show trial against British citizens Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner, as well as Moroccan citizen Ibrahim Saadun, was rushed through by Russian proxies in less than three days.
But if the death sentence is carried out, the puppet republic’s laws dictate that the condemned will be shot dead. The British government said after the sentencing that they would work with Ukrainian authorities to secure the release of those “being held as prisoners of war.”
Captured in Mariupol amid heavy fighting in April, the three were accused of acting as “mercenaries” for Ukraine and attempting to “seize power and overthrow the constitutional power” of the self-proclaimed republic.
Russian proxies who control the territory had threatened the three men with execution from the get-go, and Russia’s Defense Ministry noted that since they are not recognized officially as “combatants” in the war, they are not protected by international humanitarian law. Russian defense officials said, however, that they would likely only face a lengthy prison term.
The three men had lived in Ukraine for years prior to the Feb. 24 invasion, and were officially part of Ukraine’s Armed Forces. At the time they were captured, a statement released on behalf of Aslin on Twitter said, “It’s been 48 days, we tried our best to defend Mariupol but we have no choice but to surrender to Russian forces. We have no food and no ammunition. It’s been a pleasure everyone, I hope this war ends soon.”
The trial against the three appears to be part of Russia’s campaign to shift blame for war crimes in the decimated city of Mariupol onto those fighting for Ukraine, and bolster the Kremlin’s narrative that the West is waging war on Russia by sending foreign mercenaries to join “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine. Just hours before the death sentence was handed down against Pinner, Aslin, and Saadun on Thursday, a news outlet owned by the Kremlin-funded network Russia Today released a report claiming the sentence was part of a cunning ploy by Russian proxies. Citing anonymous sources within the Donetsk People’s Republic, the report by Ukraina.ru said the three foreigners wouldn’t really be executed, but would instead be used to force British authorities to recognize the puppet republic’s independence.
In a statement released through the British Foreign Office on Tuesday, Aslin’s family said they are enduring a “very sensitive and emotional time” and noted they are working with Ukrainian authorities and the Foreign Office to have the 28-year-old returned home.
The probe comes after a series of videos showed officers brutally beating Black motorists. (photo: AP)
The probe comes after a series of videos showed officers brutally beating Black motorists.
One particularly violent video showed state troopers punching, stunning, and dragging an unarmed man, Ronald Greene, as he apologized for failing to stop during a high-speed chase in 2019. He died shortly after, but state police initially told his family that he was killed when his car hit a tree. They refused repeated requests to release the police video.
“We find significant justification to investigate whether Louisiana State Police engages in excessive force and in racially discriminatory policing against Black residents and other people of color,” said Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general in charge of the civil rights division.
The investigation will review state police policies, training and supervision as well as how the use of force is investigated internally. It will also examine how the agency reviews complaints and disciplines officers.
Members of Congress and civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, urged the Justice Department to investigate, accusing Louisiana State Police officers of targeting Black people, using unreasonable force against them, and then trying to conceal their actions.
State Police Superintendent Lamar Davis has said he would welcome the Justice Department investigation. Two-thirds of his agency’s uses of force have been directed at Black people, he told the Associated Press, which published some of the most troubling videos.
The AP investigation found that Greene’s arrest was one of least a dozen over the past 10 years in which state police troopers or their superiors ignored or concealed evidence of beatings.
The state Legislature has planned to hold a hearing to examine what Gov. John Bel Edwards knew about the incident and the police video. His senior legal aide, Matthew Block, wrote to the committee chairman that his office is “confident that this testimony will demonstrate that neither the governor nor anyone on his staff had any role in any attempt to cover up the facts related to Mr. Greene’s death.”
Under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Justice Department has opened similar investigations of police departments in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd and in Louisville, Kentucky, following the death of Breonna Taylor. It is also investigating police departments in Phoenix and Mt. Vernon, New York.
These investigations often lead to agreements in which the police departments agree to abide by court-approved changes in how they operate to reduce violations of the civil rights of people they encounter.
The Department of State wants the drones because it says improvised explosive devices, ambushes, and hazardous wildlife are threats to personnel. (photo: Department of State)
The Department of State wants the drones because it says improvised explosive devices, ambushes, and hazardous wildlife are threats to personnel.
The news highlights how drones may be becoming more important in the U.S.'s war on drugs and the cocaine trade, one arm of which involves spraying large amounts of herbicides on a target area and which traditionally had been accomplished with small aircraft or by officers on the ground. In the U.S., pesticide sprayer drones are used somewhat commonly by commercial farmers.
“The Department of State, INL Bogota, has a requirement to purchase spray UAV systems to support eradication operations throughout Colombia,” the request published this month reads. It adds that the program will be under the command of the Colombian National Police (CNP).
As for why the State Department is seeking drones specifically, “Coca cultivation in Colombia remains at record highs and eradication operations in Colombia remain dangerous. INL Bogota is seeking to bolster the CNP’s capability to increase the coca eradication rates and minimize the risk for police personnel in the field.” Specifically, one document published along with the request points to improvised explosive devices, ambushes, and hazardous wildlife being threats.
An image included in another document of what a potential flight path of a UAV would look like shows a neat series of straight lines across what the document describes as “spray areas.” These might be between two and ten hectares each. The style of the flight paths are not dissimilar to the sort of preprogrammed routes that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has previously used for surveillance-focused flights of its Predator drones.
“The spray system should support common commercially available nozzle types (e.g., TeeJet, Kramp),” one document reads.
In an operation, an “UAS Spray Team (UST)” at a base in Colombia would receive a geo-fenced polygon of the intended spray area based on high-resolution imagery or other means, and the team plans and creates the spray mission in a piece of software, the document continues. The plan still requires a human team to travel to a “staging area,” who travel there by transport helicopter and secure the spray area, according to the document.
The plan then uses an Obstacle Marking Drone (OMD) to mark and verify the perimeter of the spray area, before a second set of Spray Drones (SD) set off to eradicate the crops. The Spray Drones may return to the staging area to “reload, refuel, and relaunch as required,” the document says. The whole process should take under two hours.
The U.S. government has previously been concerned about how Chinese made drones might be utilized by China for surveillance or other purposes. With that in mind, “The system cannot contain major hardware (e.g., flight controller) flight control firmware, or mission planning software manufactured in China. THIS REQUIREMENT CANNOT BE WAIVED,” one document adds.
This isn’t the first time the Department of State has sought UAVs for this purpose. In October 2021 it published a similar request, Nextgov reported at the time. But the latest request shows there may be continued interest in the approach.
The Department of State did not respond to a request for comment.
No one can be expected to take on climate change alone. (photo: Shanee Benjamin/Vox)
Think less like a consumer and more like an activist.
But this is also not another story about how individuals don’t matter to climate change. Blaming the crisis entirely on the politicians and fossil fuel companies who keep us in this mess and throwing up our hands is too easy an out when the stakes are so high. Unless you’re a Fortune 500 executive or have a taste for flying on private jets and owning supersized yachts, your biggest capacity for change probably won’t be as a consumer. It will be as a citizen, worker, and community member.
Action matters more than ever because the world needs to take aggressive action to avert the worst of climate change. The planet is fast approaching the catastrophic global temperatures that countries have promised to avoid. Every fraction of a degree beyond that will wreak havoc on the livelihoods of millions of people, potentially destabilize economies and political systems, and dramatically reshape water access and ecosystems as we know them.
The idea of stepping up for effective change can be overwhelming. Fortunately, the abstract cycle of inertia we’re stuck in is also made up of individuals who have the capacity to jolt the system. To understand our power, we have to take a close, thoughtful look at who we are in the world. The key is thinking in terms of collective power — like a climate activist — to make a difference.
Step 1: Think about how your skillset and interests can contribute to climate action
Breaking out of a consumer-only mindset for climate change action takes some work. It can mean thinking about your identities, your workplace, your networks, and your privileges, but also, a little more abstractly, understanding what sorts of action lead to policy change. All this will help you identify the appropriate community to link up with. In other words: You can always do more by not acting alone.
There’s a vast and diverse landscape of groups working toward a collective goal of addressing climate change, many of them working at the intersection of labor rights, racial justice, and gender activism. They just have different methods of getting there.
Every activist I spoke with acknowledged that climate activism looks unique for everyone. Pete Sikora, the climate and inequality campaigns director for the advocacy group New York Communities for Change, suggests thinking locally and looking for grassroots power. “What we think really works is a hard-hitting multiracial campaign holding a specific decision-maker accountable,” he says.
To find the right group for you, the professionals suggest thinking about a series of questions to get to the bottom of an organization’s approach to political change.
- Is the group volunteer-powered, or is it staff-based?
- Is it a big national nonprofit with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars? Or is it small and scrappy?
- Is it a locally focused group with tangible goals, like blocking a pipeline or trying to electrify one’s community? Or is there a powerful entity you’re pushing to reform, like urging a big bank to divest from fossil fuels?
There are no wrong answers here, because it’s really about showing up in whatever way you can.
It’s also important to consider how much time you’re willing to invest and how much risk you’re willing to tolerate. For the time-pressed, for example, the organization Climate Changemakers offers activities that take between two minutes and an hour, like contacting your representative.
Margaret Salamon’s Climate Emergency Fund helps incubate emerging climate campaigns that promise bolder tactics like striking and blockades. She points out one skillset that is typically overlooked in supporting the climate movement: fundraising on behalf of campaigners who need resources for their ambitious endeavors.
Activism doesn’t always have to mean going on strikes or other escalated action. Elizabeth Yeampierre, director of the climate justice-focused Uprose, based in New York, points to volunteers who have cooked meals to support a protest or led learning circles to educate fellow members on issues like gender justice within the climate movement. She argues many climate groups tend to be siloed in how they think about building community power, but climate justice groups are “really more centered on community itself.”
“People show up in a lot of ways,” Yeampierre says. “They show up to support direct actions. They show up to testify at hearings. They show up to write letters and make phone calls and do that kind of stuff. They show up on social media, but they also show up with ideas of things to do.”
Step 2: Identify your target
Climate change tends to be discussed as an existential crisis and a failure of capitalism — academic concepts that are hard to connect to real-world action. To make the abstract more tangible, activists use a power map, a simple X-Y axis chart widely used in all kinds of grassroots campaigning. The purpose is to figure out how to reach a clear and specific end goal, and come up with an actual path for reaching it.
Take what a group of Amazon workers did in 2019, when 900 employees signed a petition and ultimately walked out on the job over three demands: that Amazon stop donating to politicians and groups that reject climate science, stop allowing oil companies to use its cloud computing services for oil extraction, and accelerate its net-zero climate ambitions to 2030. Like many campaigns, this one delivered mixed results. But the company continues to face growing pressure over its environmental impact. In 2021, it also fired two leaders of the group, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, later reaching a settlement with them.
Hopefully, when you’re thinking about that end goal, you’ve already found some allies in your fight like the Amazon employees did (see step 1!) who can help you work backward to figure out what it would take to win. The first move is figuring out who in the organization, city, or entity you’re targeting is the ultimate decision-maker of your ask. It might be the CEO or board of directors, or it might be an elected official or an appointed regulatory body.
That person or group — the target of your campaign — is going to go on your power map. They’ll be pretty high on the Y axis, which plots people based on their position of influence or power. The X axis represents the level of allyship. Then you start to fill in more points on the graph: the people that person listens to, where you can gain a foothold (like exerting pressure through voters, shareholders, or customers), and your own networks. If you’re a newcomer to activism, it can help to play around with this and actually write out a chart.
Activists use power mapping in fights across the country to identify the flow of decision-making, the sources of resources and money, and the places where there might be points of intervention. It breaks down insurmountable-seeming goals into manageable steps by pinpointing the people, with names and job titles, who are in positions of power.
Thinking in terms of power was what guided climate campaigners in New York City to fight to keep gas out of new buildings. They wanted to mirror the success that dozens of cities in California had banning gas connections in new construction. A coalition of racial justice and climate groups, including New York Communities for Change (NYCC), New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), Food and Water Watch, and WE ACT for Environmental Justice, came together to break down the lofty goal into concrete targets and identify the individuals they’d have to influence in order to get the policy made.
Digging into their power map, they realized plotting “elected officials” or even “city council” on the chart was too broad. They drilled down to specific positions, identifying that the person they needed was the speaker on the council, who directs what legislation comes to a vote. Now they had a name: Corey Johnson.
To bring attention to their cause among competing priorities, the activists needed some leverage. So they pinpointed allies, like Councilmember Alicka Ampry-Samuel, a central Brooklyn Democrat, who helped them advocate to Johnson. They also started organizing small photo ops and rallies targeting Johnson, and had dozens of people make calls to their council members, directing them to talk to Johnson.
NYCC’s Sikora wrote a detailed accounting of how all these tactics came together thanks to a multiracial coalition that managed to get the bill passed in 10 months, making New York City the biggest city in the country to transition new buildings away from gas, affecting 2,000 new buildings each year.
Here’s what the campaign looked like once plotted out — an exercise that is more art than science. Vox adapted Sikora’s account of the campaign as a power map.
Activists have replicated and adapted these techniques for local fights throughout the country, urging pension funds and universities to divest from fossil fuels, slowing major petrochemical projects along the Gulf of Mexico, and blocking gas export terminals in the Pacific Northwest using a similar set of strategies.
“If you become an activist and become part of this world, you’ll end up encountering this practice or trained to think like this,” Sikora explains. But he warned that it’s important not to get too caught up in activist theory, because “it’s the doing and winning campaigns that teaches you the set of techniques.”
Step 3: Bring climate change discourse offline
What most activist advice comes down to is showing up, in every way you can, and bringing effective tools to the process. That means extending online communities to in-person meetups, rallies, and protests, but also introducing activism to a taboo area: the workplace.
Jamie Alexander of the climate-solutions-oriented nonprofit Project Drawdown works to help push climate goals inside people’s offices. “Everyone has felt that climate change is not something that you bring in the workplaces,” she says. “It’s emotional, it’s anxiety-provoking, it’s political. You check it at the door when you come into work. That’s not serving anyone.”
She has seen people in all lines of work bring a climate-conscious mindset to implement change at their job or in their field. By “zooming out and seeing your discipline or job function more broadly,” she explains, you can consider how it can be put to use on the crisis. “How can this job function be leveraged in service of the climate?”
Again, it starts with finding allies. In large companies, Alexander says, there might already be an employee resource group focused on the environment, or perhaps a Slack channel devoted to climate change. If neither exist, consider starting one yourself. Thinking about power and how to leverage it comes back into play once you find like-minded colleagues. Identify who in the company makes key decisions, then who is whispering in the ears of those people and what messages they typically get.
It may not be immediately obvious what you can do from your own perch, but there are real-world examples of people thinking creatively about the ways their work intersects with the climate. There are tech workers, cafeteria workers, and marketers all trying to make a difference, pushing their companies or fields to adopt clean energy targets, cut down on food waste, and change their messaging around fossil fuels.
In this incredibly destabilized world, showing up in more ways than just with your wallet builds a belief in the power to enact change. Organizational behavior expert Thomas Bateman and climate scientist Michael Mann have written about the importance of believing in one’s powers, or self-efficacy, which can make you “more likely to persevere, rebound from setbacks, and perform at high levels.” In other words, action protects people from burnout, nihilism, and despair over feeling helpless to stop climate change.
Just as importantly, grassroots power builds collective strength. There’s a surprising amount of hope in grassroots action, Uprose’s Yeampierre says. “We need for people to know that there’s hope and that there are solutions that are transformational. It’s important not just to focus on the problem and the challenge, but for people to look at what we’ve already accomplished despite all the challenges.”
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