Article 1, Section 5 of our Constitution gives each house of Congress the right to “punish its member for disorderly behavior.” Diane Feinstein has disgraced herself, and taken the Senate a descent into Dante Inferno below what many thought possible. San Francisco Chronicle stated the process unfair to Judge Kavanaugh and no one will confuse the Chronicle as part of the right wing conspiracy. The Senate should censure Feinstein at the very minimal for what she did.
Feinstein was aware of the charges before the hearings began and refuse to share this information or even confront Kavanaugh with this when given the chance. Even today, Grassley has yet to receive the un-redacted copy of the letter so we have no clue what was in the letter. Feinstein misled her colleagues and in the process, disgraced the body she serves. The last three Senators censured dealt with financial misconduct. For Feinstein, it was not about finances since she is worth nearly 100 million dollars but she is facing a tough re-election campaign and her own party refuse to endorse her at the state convention. Her ambush of Kavanaugh was to save her political skin and she was willing to traffic in smear tactics that compare to Joseph McCarthy to do so.
National Review Michael Swartz noted, “Not only did she fail in her committee duties, but she did everything she could to make the charge public in a way that made the target’s defense difficult or impossible. The charge was lodged anonymously, and rather than subjecting it to vetting by her fellow senators, Feinstein made a transparently groundless referral of the matter to the FBI — as if there could conceivably be a federal law-enforcement dimension to the decades-old claim of sexual assault — which the FBI, to its credit, unceremoniously filed away. Left hanging in the glare of a still-untested sexual-assault charge — which today has the same resonance that a charge of Communist sympathies had in McCarthy’s day — are Judge Kavanaugh, his wife, and his two daughters. They are in a far worse position than was the young lawyer in whose defense Welch made his famous statement… Where does all this leave the Kavanaugh nomination? Barring the emergence of evidence unequivocally confirming the charge, senators who are on the fence might want to consider that a vote against the nominee now necessarily excuses and even legitimates Feinstein’s misconduct. If the senators don’t take their own institution’s procedures seriously, and refuse to stand against so blatant a breach, it’s hard to expect the rest of us to do so.” If they don’t censure Feinstein, the Senate is rewarding this behavior and shouldn’t be surprise if it happens again. It would even be better they expel Feinstein, if they want to prevent this in the future and send a message to future Senators that this behavior will never be tolerated. It requires a two third vote to remove Feinstein from the Senate but only a majority to censure. If Senate doesn’t expel Feinstein, then censure her.
The Donelson Files 