Dianne Feinstein has died
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Details:
> Four U.S. senators, including three Democrats, as well as three former Feinstein staffers and the California Democratic member of Congress told The Chronicle in recent interviews that her memory is rapidly deteriorating. They said it appears she can no longer fulfill her job duties without her staff doing much of the work required to represent the nearly 40 million people of California.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/dianne-feinstei...
With our aging population, we need to figure out how to be inclusive of those who can contribute, while identifying those who can not. Hard age limits are likely becoming less desirable as the population ages - retirement at 55 will seem like a joke. But that doesn't mean we should just accept people who are not with it in various positions of power.
California and senate elections are slightly better in that regard, however, look at how much money Feinstein was able to raise over her opponents. This is nothing special about Feinstein, it's an advantage incumbents generally enjoy:
https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/dianne-feins...
I think getting this money out of politics is a start to ensuring elections are based on the candidate themselves & their policies and less around how much special interests already have invested in them. I don't have any ideas about how to get more people to show up specifically for primary elections, but the ideas people have around getting more people to vote in general elections could help, like expanding absentee voting, making it a holiday, etc.
> The U.S. electorate is aging: 52% of registered voters are ages 50 and older, up from 41% in 1996. This shift has occurred in both partisan coalitions. More than half of Republican and GOP-leaning voters (56%) are ages 50 and older, up from 39% in 1996. And among Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters, half are 50 and older, up from 41% in 1996.
> Another way to consider the aging of the electorate is to look at median age. The median age among all registered voters increased from 44 in 1996 to 50 in 2019. It rose from 43 to 52 among Republican registered voters and from 45 to 49 among Democratic registered voters.
I think that on average, people consider age significant, so they expect their candidate to be around as old as them. I don't think it's the whole picture, but it helps me feel less baffled at least.
Their underlings support them because they lose access to a great influencer in case of removal.
It's more difficult for young people to rise up when there's very little influence to be had. However, in times of great upheaval young people tend to rise up much faster as the incompetent people at the top get removed.
California runs an open primary and a top two general.
I'm not especially in favor of short term limits, since there is a benefit to politicians with experience. But I'd definitely consider options that better balance their reasonable desire to elect experienced and influential candidates with the very heavy hand that experience puts on everybody else.
Heck, California has gone so far as to have all their senate elections be between two members of the same party.
At the end of the day, the people continue to elect them. If voters were unhappy with Feinstein's performance (or that of her key aides), the solution was as simple as voting her out.
Name recognition is powerful.
Seniority leads to leadership of key committees in the US Congress.
But, I do agree that this is a problem. RBG was another example - had she retired a few years prior to her death, the state of SCOTUS would be very different today. Was she addicted to the power? Did she truly think nobody younger could do a better job? Same for Feinstein, McConnell, Biden, and many others on both sides of the aisle.
Life or death. The mindset is that when they retire they have nothing to live for and will die soon after. The personality type required to get to a powerful position like Senator can also (frequently * ) not be able to conceive of a meaningful life after office. Quitting office is like giving up on life for these people.
*Jimmy Carter is a good counter example. He found a meaningful purpose after holding a powerful office.
Perhaps the "reason to live" is more important than people realize.
Often these incompetent people are in "safe seat" regions. Either heavily democrat or republican. Voters won't switch parties just because representative is incompetent. There should be another options.
In her last election, both final candidates were Democrats. Neither party could unseat her. Voters have been clear that they preferred Feinstein to anybody else.
So the question is why? Was it her power in the Senate? Was she particularly good at bringing pork to CA? Or was it just money and the political machine? Probably a lot of that last item - the parties themselves have incentives to keep winning politicians around - they're good for fund-raising.
This is their life. It is literally the only thing they have ever one in one form or another.
For many of us this would be like never touching a computer again after turning 65.
Could be a bit more true of Biden, I don't know, but I doubt it's significantly more than other high profile figures or other presidents.
[1] This article is from six years ago. https://www3.bostonglobe.com/news/science/2017/10/11/congres...
is: "McConnell’s frozen moment renews questions about America’s aged leaders" https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/31/politics/mitch-mcconnell-...
this is an interview he gave within the last week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qldqgtCYMs0
In the military, you're always training a replacement, and come 65 (or 68), you're retiring, regardless of your capacity.
That is: Why do we exclude people under 18 from voting? Because we think they don't have the mental tools to understand policy well enough to make an informed decision. Well, if seniors don't have the mental tools anymore, should they be allowed to vote?
And this is even stronger with holding office. You can vote at 18, but you can't be a representative until 25, or a senator until 35. Why? Because you need to be old enough to (hopefully) have some judgment. Well, what if you're too old to have judgment?
So, yeah, excluding seniors from office would in fact be reasonable. Or at least requiring an annual mental competency test.
Unfortunately, we'll never get it without a state-driven constitutional convention, because those with the most power in Congress are highly correlated with those with the highest age.
Not every 15 year old would make an unsatisfactory legislator, and yet ...
The minimum ages necessarily put an upward skew on it, but very few are anywhere near the minimum. There is little need to ensure representation for the elderly. And meantime, anybody of working age is badly under-represented.
An age limit would be a crude form of that. So would a term limit.
We could alter the seniority system that gives much more weight to people who have been there the longest. But that's a rule Congress passes for itself, and it's hard to imagine many incumbents giving up on a privilege they've been waiting for.
And then we see under-18 routinely be charged as adults.
And yes, if 15 year olds could vote and run for office, I do think we'd see more issues aimed at the younger generations ALONG WITH longer views of how our government is run. And we're seeing the judicial side of this with youngsters suing for climate devastation, like https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/08/1...
And if you've been around many elderly people, you know that quite a few are less competent to vote than the average 14-year-old student council member, and that letting ~all of them do so is no less arbitrary than that "18".
There's no way to separate the able minded from the seniles fairly, so an age limit is the best way to do it.
This would seem to be less democratic rather than more. The voters have less options than before, so the shift in power is from voters to experts.
So at least age limits are something everyone can prepare for and expect, rather than it being a surprise?
No. Psychiatry, like politics and law, depends much on the personal beliefs of the human in charge. Look at our supreme court. Justices are supposed to be impartial, but they still tend to decide cases based on their political leanings.
That's a feature, not a bug, of being human.
Do we really want political games around deciding who is fit or unfit for office? I can 100% guarantee that this will cause more shit-slinging from both sides at each other than meaningful action
Her staff could just finish out her term and nothing would change but that's illegal because she's dead.
Not only that, it doesn't allow for distributed counts [2], it can wreck the secret ballot [3], and it is not monotonic [4]. Arrow gives us an impossibility result for elections but monotonicity is the worst criterion to give up, especially when the system has so many other flaws.
[0] https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html
[1] see examples cited in https://rangevoting.org/NoIrv.html
[2] sure, you can transmit the contents of all of the ballots, but then it's still a centralized count...
[3] n! grows much much larger than population, so you can encode ballot ID
People come to the question of voting assuming it's easy to understand...We've never had to deal with complexity around the concept so we expect it to be simple.
Introducing an algorithm plays into the fears of people who believe in a deep state which is secretly trying to manipulate people.
We deeply need a better voting system, but one of the core requirements must be that one can explain it to a middle schooler in 30 seconds.
And yet it’s happening in NYC:
_“The first Ranked Choice Voting election was on February 2nd, 2021 in a special election for NYC Council District 24 (Queens).”_
If you can make it in NYC, you can make it anywhere.
https://www.nyc.gov/site/civicengagement/voting/ranked-choic...
The multiple choice question was: which of these answers lists the planets in order from smallest to largest diameter?
This was for a high school diploma equivalent! I was stumped for a while wondering if I was understanding the question correctly.
Anyway, I passed the test, but the fact this question was on there gave me serious doubts as to the general skill of the populace. I'm a fan of RCV over the current system, but I know it's going to trip a lot of people up.
With any RCV method, you win because math says so. In a normal election you count.
It's basically 100% guaranteed that someone who won most first choices but lost the election will try to delegitimize the election with stupid populism.
The first and most important job of an election is to ensure peaceful transfer of power.
My favorite alternate system is approval voting. Vote any number of candidates rather than just one. Most votes wins. 5 seconds and no nerd required.
1) You opponents campaign manager will lie about their candidate without qualms. 2) Donors will give money to a scoundrel, as long as they think the scoundrel will win. 3) Voters are actually good at picking up bullshit - in aggregate. 4) Rich white liberal female voters will not vote for a man. 5) Plenty of Black, Asian, and Immigrant voters are conservative, but many reflexively vote liberal. 6) Do it, even if you lose by a small amount like I did, you'll learn a lot and have a lot of fun
Some examples:
- Congressional elections are expensive; incumbents have deeper-rooted donor networks to tap.
- Civic groups that are already working with the incumbent want to continue the relationship.
- General voter apathy around primary elections; even regular voters often skip primaries so finding people who will actually vote gets harder.
- Name recognition; if someone shows up to the polls to vote for another ballot item but hasn't followed the congressional race, they'll probably put a box next to the incumbent unless they have a particular reason not to.
I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing -- high turnover of elected officials is disruptive to the system -- but there are clearly cases in which it overcorrects.
This becomes even worse when combined with "safe" districts where whoever wins the primary for the district's ruling party is nearly guaranteed to win the general election as well. It makes one wonder how democratic we should consider such an election to be.
All this is to say that it's important to not just look at whether an institution is democratic in form, but whether it is also democratic in outcomes. The Law of Unintended Consequences will be obeyed.
[https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.h...]
Do the 'Mom Test' on any candidate and you will see why 9 out of 10 times a challenger to an incumbent fails [0]. The only challengers who succeed beat the 'good enough test' while simultaneously fending off the current administration's inertia (aptly put by paulgb)
Has many advantages over RCV / IRV (Ranked Choice Voting / Instant Runoff Voting). For one - no need to change ballots; educating the public is a single sentence rather than a more-complicated explanation.
Imagine a case where I really really want one guy, and between the remaining two I have a strong preference for one over the other. RCV lets me express that.
Approval would have been stuck. Should I mention the 2nd guy? I do want them if it came to having to choose but I’d hate to place them on even footing with my top top pick.
https://medium.com/election-science/expressiveness-6ef8c034b...
tl;dr - for any two candidates, X and Y, the voters who approve only one of them express a "ranked preference" between them. and because those voters are, on average, a good statistical sample of the X-vs-Y preference of the entire electorate, approval voting turns out to measure voter preferences very accurately.
whereas instant runoff voting can actually have much bigger problems in preference detection because it only looks at one layer of preferences at a time. for example:
35% left center 33% right center 32% center
in this example, center is preferred to both the left and the right by a LANDSLIDE 2/3rds majority, yet is the first candidate eliminated. this happens because of "vote splitting" (spoiler effect) between the two more partisan candidates. so it might _feel_ like you expressed your preferences better. but you didn't really.
and what about STRATEGIC VOTING?
if right wins, then the left supporters will wish they had strategically voted for center to prevent that. and if left wins, then right supporters will wish they had strategically voted for center to prevent that.
approval voting satisfies the "favorite betrayal criterion", which means it cannot possibly hurt you to support your sincere favorite candidate.
for these and many other reasons, approval voting is vastly superior to ranking. https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-i...
They all have different strengths and weaknesses. We should be trying to move to more optimal systems.
Meanwhile approval voting is exhaustively explained by "vote for as many candidates as you like. Candidate with the most votes wins."
A "more optimal" voting system doesn't exist in a vacuum, public understanding and trust make a voting system more optimal. Just not more mathematically optimal.
Alaska has the right idea: a jungle primary where the top-4 advance, followed by an RCV general. RCV by itself doesn't do much. You have to weaken the primary electorate, as Alaska does.
Or, if the Senate is really meant to represent the states rather than the people, it should only be concerned with state issues: which issues belong at the federal level, and which at the state level, for example.
I've seen this happen in the real world in Italy.
Can't be much worse and statistically it should have basically the same outcome.
(Yes, there are primaries, but the DNC and RNC hold an astronomical amount of power in picking the candidates and influencing the winners.)
Weekend at Bernie's should remain a farce and not a commentary on reality.
And while ranked choice voting is probably superior, it'd be a lot easier for one of the parties to implement RCV internally then call it a day. The major problem is that the primary system is too incumbent-friendly, making it hard for challengers to grow organically.
And I don't buy the argument that the US Congress Regulars have done a good job. They look like they've mucked a lot of stuff up, badly, and left a series of ruins behind them. Literally in many cases.
That's a fact, not a guess.
She should have left, but the reason she didn't should be happening either.
many of her constituents aren't allowed to vote
Or, test them for physicals and minds before they can take on the job, do it annually, it's a normal practice in all other fields, it's good for all sides.
She wasn’t senile that entire time.
(I’ll quantify right wing: She voted with the Trump administration more than any other democrat, and voted like an average republican senator during his administration.)
That's nonsense. She voted like every other cookie cutter corporate Democrat, i.e. whatever her handlers told her to do. At the tail end of her career, it was pretty explicit (and disgusting to watch): https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/sen-dianne-feinste...
Some stats on here "voting with Trump": https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/
She's clearly not at the top of that pile when sorting by Democrats.
There should be age limits for public office and it should match whatever we consider the retirement age to be. We have too many dusty old codgers running things and ruining things, clawing at power and money while destroying civilization for their great grandchildren (which is all the worse, because they’ve met them).
When I see someone like Feinstein elected repeatedly, it’s blatant evidence of how broken politics is in America. In California, apparently, policy positions, personal character, and corruption don’t matter, you can elect a corpse in a wheelchair if it has a D next to its name, and they did.
That would create wrong incentives for pushing the retirement age upwards though.
People over 70 should not be running the country, and currently the median Congressperson is on social security. We have a problem.
At least now you have the (minuscule, I admit) chance that some secure senator will go against his or her party because they know their seat is secure in re-election.
I'm sure there are plenty of hypotheses as to why this happens, but whatever the cause elected officials seem to have an extremely easy go of getting re-elected these days. The increasing average age in Congress is just a side effect of that in my opinion.
If there are age minimums for these federal offices there should be age maximums.
Yes there are skills to be learned to be effective in such a system, but being too entrenched in it can lead to forming relationships that overshadow the relationship with their constituents.
Term limits are effective against populists, for whatever that's worth.
Theres no magic bullet unfortunately. Any line in the sand will have people caught in the crossfire, whether that's a person over the age limit that would make an excellent representative or a person who is blocked from a third term that actually isn't corrupted by the machine of political favor, lobbyists, etc.
It might be better to lower the income to 90th or 50th percentile, so only people that actually wanted the job would take it.
Ideally, the restrictions would extend to the kids. It would definitely extend to the spouses.
Also, all no campaign donations over $50. Finally, all campaign communications must be publicly archived in realtime, and no more political ads. (The latter is because some politicians now tell different, personalized lies to each constituent, thanks to the internet).
Another possibility is to let anyone volunteer for congress, then pick the winner at random from the pool each term. This worked amazingly well for local positions in some country that tried it. (Government efficiency immediately doubled or something.)
A wealthy person is also totally fine with whatever the salary is, because they already have a bunch of money.
I see that as a different problem to solve, but yeah if the solution to one can supercede the other I'd get behind that.
I actually really hate this idea whenever it comes up, at least for the kids. It feels rather oppressive that you could have your largely-estranged parent decide to get into politics, and have that entirely derail your life.
The current system gives us a bunch of grifters like the Trump kids or Hunter Biden, to be sure, but I'd rather directly punish the parent who's being corrupt than their children who don't even hold office.
Imagine working at a job where there were rules that forced your company to lay off all the most experienced folks after a few years.
Sounds miserable to me.
1- One six-year term on the presidency. Enough time to get stuff done and see the results, but then you're out. The current structure gives the American public 1-2 years of productivity, then they go into campaign mode on the tax payers dime.
2- All official party nominees get the exact same budget for campaigning. Creates a level playing field and neutralizes the power of lobbying
3- Congressman, Senators, Governors are limited to a single 6 year term. This will create a lot of churn, require voters to get engaged to understand the candidates better, and eliminate lifetime politicians who will inevitably be corrupted (I'm a cynic).
Need to ponder how to hedge the power of the people behind the scenes who support the office since they are unelected and undoubtedly powerful (I'm thinking about the people writing Biden's scripts, who are they, who elected them, what do they believ, etc.... we know he isn't doing it).
Give them a fixed number of years and have new ones appointed on a schedule that's synced to presidential terms.
I see a need for impartial testing of "able to do the job", such as "can count backwards from 20 without falling asleep or missing any numbers or going briefly catatonic".
Term limits definitely aren't a magic fix, I just see the tradeoffs as worth it relative to my personal concerns.
I'm sure there are plenty of hypotheses as to why this happens, but whatever the cause elected officials seem to have an extremely easy go of getting re-elected these days. The increasing average age in Congress is just a side effect of that in my opinion.
As you say, it's easy to point to the folks who have been in office forever as being an issue, but there's also staff and lobbyists and other unelected roles that are hard to get rid of the influence of. At the end of the day, someone needs to be the expert, either on the vast array of issues that can come up in national government, or in how to actually do something about those issues.
If a lot of the "real" work is done by the staffers, career government workers, etc then the politician really is the public face and occasionally redirecting the ship. I'd say there is less risk there and more to gain from fresh faces and opinions in that spot, again if that's how the workload shakes out behind the scenes
"Colleagues, critics and an increasingly restive field of aspiring successors have questioned her health and fitness for office — a concern, her supporters noted, that few have raised for male octogenarians in the Senate — but friends said she made her decision on her own timetable."
Proof is in the pudding, eh? But more seriously, plenty have criticized McConnell for his public health lapses, and the two of them together kicked off a lot of bipartisan (citizen) grumbling about old politicians. Then of course our main presidential candidates...
The kerfuffle about sexism when criticizing Feinstein is hogwash.
I don't know her full legacy, and I recall her being a good thorn in the side of Bush when he needed one. Sad it took this event to get a replacement.
And Newsom promised to put in a black woman, but also promised not to put in someone actually running for Senate. I wonder if the relevant groups of citizens care about that declaration.
Yes, you heard me. I am not even going to pause for a condolance or bite my tongue. I'm glad she's gone. She was 100% unfit for the position in the last few years of her life and nothing was done about it. This is a problem with US Politics, they are too fucking old to represent the actual population so they are pulled by SIGs and lobbyists. We are not accurately represented.
We need term limits in the Senate. She was part of the problem, and the problem needs to be fixed.
A mentor of mine used to remind me, "always react with class". I fail at this a lot, but try.
I think it would be good for you to try too.
And also to remember that she was fairly elected. She was who the people wanted. If you want to be angry, be angry at the people who continued to elect her.
Maybe not so much vitrol directed at her on a day of tragedy.
Nevertheless attempts to pin the blame on her for things her constituency was obviously happy or oblivious to is misguided.
Term limits give more power to the lobbyists and other back-room powers, because they are never term limited, and they quickly learn how to be exceptionally persuasive to newbie representatives.
At least a non-limited representative has the chance to learn to resist, thought it's pretty darn rare. Term limits would snuff that out entirely.
You feel like heaping vitrol on a recently deceased person is an acceptable thing to do?
My point was about reacting with class.
You don't have to live that way, but practicing it makes your life and the lives of those around you better.
I agree with your other points though.
One of the unintended consequences of term limits is the strengthening of the bureaucracy.
But heaping vitriol does much more against the heaper than the heapee, in almost all cases.
Who was supposed to do something?
It outlives me when I'm gone
Like the scripture says:
'Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree
And no one shall make them afraid.'
I wanna sit under my own vine and fig tree
A moment alone in the shade
At home in this nation we've made
One last time..."
-Hamilton An American Musical
I'm not convinced anyone in Congress has read that tale.
She was basically trapped in the job when the Senate refused to appoint Obama's pick to fill the vacant seat of Scalia. If she had retired it would have just been two empty seats for Trump to fill quicker. People were actively asking her to stay in the job.
Feinstein was a democratic senator in a democratic state with a democratic governor. She was actively being told she was unfit. She should have just retired.
I still remember the plethora of articles about RBG's supercool workout regimen dating back to the early 2010s because she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2009. The fixation on her health was largely because everyone knew this woman was getting ready to kick the bucket at some point, but she refused to make her exit before the Republicans took control over Congress.
Just some examples of what I'm talking about as evidence:
* https://www.yahoo.com/shine/healthy-living/ruth-bader-ginsbu...
* https://abovethelaw.com/2013/03/meet-the-personal-trainer-to...
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/personal-trainer-bryant...
* https://time.com/4804007/ruth-bader-ginsburgs-workout-book/ (a bit later but you get the idea)
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-chemerinsky-gins...
Obama met her when Democrats had a majority, and IIRC obliquely inquired/suggested that she retire and she brushed it off.
Obama may well have been right. But the suggestion should have come from one of the other liberals on the court. (And it may well have, for all we know. But we wouldn't hear about it one way or the other.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/us/politics/rbg-retiremen...
"Most" implies "some are". Where that line gets drawn is open to debate and discussion, though there are stories which cross the threshold.
In Feinstein's case, she was the senator from California, a powerful region unto itself and with high significance to Silicon Valley, entertainment, and other factors with which HN is directly concerned. That much discussion on such news at HN tends not to be highly substantive is ... unfortunate, though that tends to come with the territory of politics.
There have been other stories about deaths or transitions of significant political figures:
Senators: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
Congressional representatives are more difficult to search but do turn up: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23878741>
Presidential elections, not limited to the US: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752077>
We have retirement limits but no limits for our leaders who are presiding over the most important political offices and making critical decisions.
She was one the people who changed the profile of power. That profile can only change so much at a time and change it to accommodate women was and still is a very big deal.
I didn’t always agree with her but I always thought she was committed to public service. And, like any long-serving senator, she changed her mind. Time and growth will do that, especially in a legislative body that should be built on compromise and inclusivity.
It’s sad to me that the end her career became dominated by not stepping down. I don’t know much — or anything — about back room politics but can imagine it was a decision calculated and agreed to by more than her or her staff.
I read an article a few months ago — I can’t find it now because of today’s news flood for her name — that talked about the way she wrote letters, position papers, instructions for years. She communicated in writing. And that is part of what gave her a high functioning staff and one that could support her in this last term. She had spent a lifetime in public service documenting what she thought.
In President Biden’s statement, he wrote that she was often the only woman in the room. Every article is chronicling her firsts. That she was the first woman to represent CA in the senate and that she was tenacious and held on when other people thought she should go quietly seems to me a perfectly logical pairing.
They're not even entirely wrong in the short term -- the Democrats in particular seem to have been doing a really awful job of nurturing younger leadership candidates over the last decade or so. Possibly because of the geriatrics who run the party feeling (subconsciously?) threatened by the push they'd then face to retire...?
That said, I wouldn't expect it to prevent a pretty quick replacement if Senate business demands it, so it likely won't be a significant impact from a political or operational perspective.
Is that something he has actually said?
> “Yes. Interim appointment. I don’t want to get involved in the primary,” Newsom said. “It would be completely unfair to the Democrats that have worked their tail off. That primary is just a matter of months away. I don’t want to tip the balance of that.”
Like yes there are a lot of self-imposed rules in the Senaate, but it's fundamentally on the Democrats that they can't pull together 51 votes to tweak the rules.
This means judicial nominations are effectively hamstrung for the time being.
That was in the case of a retirement. This is a death and reappointment. I am unsure if the new Senator would assume Sen Feinstein's previous committee assignments, but all of my instincts around the Senate say no. So we are back in the position of relying on the GOP to allow the new Senator to fully serve and represent the 39 million citizens of California. If you know anything about the modern GOP and their despise for democracy, you know they will never let that happen.
Sorry, California, the 39 million of you only get 1.3 senators for the next 15 months. The 576 thousand people of Wyoming will still get their full 2.
Caveat - I'm not American and have never taken a US history class. This is just something I heard on a podcast.
Also, the intended function of the Senate was to oversee process and senators were selected by state legislators. They are not supposed to originate legislation. But it got a bit twisted up since then.
California can appoint an interim Senator (per their constitutional & laws - I believe the governor does it without any approval from other parties).
Committee appointment is by Senate rules. There's no automatic right to a seat on a committee. Judiciary is a massively important committee because it oversees the approval of federal judges (without committee approval, the nominees never get to the floor for a vote).
The GOP can block a committee replacement via filibuster. The Democrats could attempt a rules package to prevent filibuster, but Manchin (D-WV) has historically been against those.
The purpose of a senator is to represent the state, not the people. That's why in the US Constitution it says that senators will be elected by state legislators (later changed by the 17th amendment to be elected by the people).
Representatives represent the people. That's why the number of representatives is proportional to the population of the state, and the senators are proportional to the states (there's approx. 1 state per state).
No they get two. Just as Wyoming, which is how the country has always worked and is the only reason the country exists in the first place. I’ve no idea where you pulled “1.3” from but this has always been and remains such an insufferable talking point from left leaning people, the United States is just that, a republican union of states, larger states specifically should not be able to impose their rule on smaller states.
But, her death leaves her committee seats open. Filling those seats will take time and where she was in a leadership position, that needs resolved. Committees often have a 1-vote edge to the majority party, so those committees may be effectively deadlocked until replacements are nominated/approved (this is almost exclusively a Senate task - so can the Democratic leadership in the Senate get new members into committees in a timely manner).
Edit - typos
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/05/03/how-do-st...
In Feinstein's case, its pretty clear she was forced to stay on by her party while they made arrangements for her successor, there is a lot of people and factions in California who want her seat in the Democratic party.
Also the competency crisis is real, alot of them dont have successors. Often by their own actions in an attempt to consolidate power, but they've left the field barren now thats its time for them to leave.
afaik she asked to be elected, did not need to part with anything (i mean she did not have property rights to the seat, if i m not mistaken senators do get elected)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_stagnation_in_th....
Default Bias Fallacy: (also, Normalization of Evil, "Deal with it;" "If it ain't broke, don't fix it;" Acquiescence; "Making one's peace with the situation;" "Get used to it;" "Whatever is, is right;" "It is what it is;" "Let it be, let it be;" "This is the best of all possible worlds [or, the only possible world];" "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't."): The logical fallacy of automatically favoring or accepting a situation simply because it exists right now, and arguing that any other alternative is mad, unthinkable, impossible, or at least would take too much effort, expense, stress or risk to change. The opposite of this fallacy is that of Nihilism ("Tear it all down!"), blindly rejecting what exists in favor of what could be, the adolescent fantasy of romanticizing anarchy, chaos (an ideology sometimes called political "Chaos Theory"), disorder, "permanent revolution," or change for change's sake.
this is such spin, zero-content and relativistic nonsense.. Artificial polarity of "left" and "right" plays into the "dumbification" of commentary. Second, this is the news of her death so, although a career politician, best to her family and all involved, first to say.
Too soon?
- https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/as-feinstein...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_tra...
- https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/14/dianne-feinstein-hu...
etc.
Even without term limits they should have the decency to know when to call it quits and not become a figurehead where most of the work they’re entrusted with is done behind the scenes by others —none of this bullshit whispering in their ear on how to vote.
At least have them have to pass significant cognitive tests by a panel of competent professionals who are voted in by both parties (or as many parties as have greater than 5% rep).
Weekend at Bernie's should remain a farce and not become reality.
If there's anything 2020-2021 and the 4th branch of the gov't taught me, it's that we need to quit putting authority figures in positions of power over the people, for the sole reason of being an authority figure.
The the American Association of Rapacious People can't have that.
This to me falls under the “rules for thee not me.”
Become congressperson. Use insider knowledge to make fortuitous trades, remain immune!
0 - https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/incumbent-adv...
And even then, they wouldn't keep getting major donor funding if they weren't voting in those people's interests, incumbent or no.
In general "I'll only ever vote X party" is the same as "I don't care who at all".
Hooray for the 2-party system.