Now that Rand Paul has announced he won’t vote to confirm Mike Pompeo as secretary of state or Gina Haspel as CIA director, and given John McCain’s prolonged absence from the Senate due to his illness (and his skepticism about Haspel’s nomination due to his longstanding opposition to torture), President Trump’s nominees will need at least some Democratic support to win confirmation. In the case of Pompeo, that shouldn’t be a problem. Haspel, due to her supervision of a secret CIA facility that engaged in waterboarding and possibly other forms of torture as well, will have a tougher time getting confirmed.
Leading Democrats, including Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, who serves on the Intelligence Committee, and Representative Jerry Nadler of New York, who's the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, have already said that Haspel's oversight of torture operations should disqualify her from heading the CIA.
Which brings us to the continually curious case of California's Dianne Feinstein, who, according to a Washington Post story on Wednesday, “appeared to defend” Haspel. “She has been a good deputy director,” Feinstein told the Post, going on to note that the torture that took place on Haspel’s watch was not yet specifically illegal. (Subsequent legislation by McCain, backed by Feinstein, did outlaw torture.)
Hmmm. Talk about your soft bigotry of low expectations! You might think that precisely because torture wasn't yet illegal, Haspel had the option of exercising her judgment in deciding whether to allow such procedures to go forward. You might think her decision would be a reasonable basis for senators' confirmation votes.
Apparently, that's not how Feinstein operates. In the time-honored tradition of the Senate, she likes to reward public figures who, if only for a moment, exhibit a rudimentary reasonableness or confirm her expectations for how the Washington establishment should operate. That the Washington establishment has long been full of dangerous loons, and is fuller now than ever before, is a fact she seems unable to grasp. Having expressed the hope that Trump would grow into his job, she effused at Trump's momentary support for more gun control, which, of course, he rescinded a couple days later. Haspel appears to pass muster with her for functioning efficiently as the CIA's deputy director.
As she's done before, in her votes to authorize the Iraq War and support George W. Bush's tax cuts on the wealthy, Feinstein appears to be positioning herself to cast a vote likely to appall most of her fellow Democrats.
This time around, however, she has a Democratic challenger—California Senate President Kevin De Leon—who on this and other issues not only parts company with Feinstein, but is closer to the moral sense of most Californians. De Leon has an uphill battle, but Feinstein's apparently irrepressible instinct to affirm the establishment, no matter how deranged it may be, gives him a fighting chance.
