FEINSTEIN — ‘IT’S THE HARDEST TIME’
Senator bemoans instability Trump has created, talks DACA, transportation, housing and gun control at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s fireside chat
Serving in the Senate over the last year has been the most difficult time of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s 25year career in Washington, D.C., she said Monday — and that’s because of President Trump.
“It’s the hardest time in all the time I’ve been back there,” she said in an interview with the Bay Area News Group editorial board on Monday, arguing that Trump’s actions have created “instability” in the nation’s capital.
In Feinstein’s meetings with Trump over the last few months, the president suggested he’d support legislation to protect young undocumented immigrants and another bill to ban some assault weapons — only to backtrack on those positions within days.
“It drives you up the wall,” Feinstein said. A president’s word should be like “going to the bank,” she added.
Her remarks came in an hour-long interview in San Jose that also touched on her efforts to pass new gun control measures, pinning down Trump on a DACA deal and her call for Facebook to “take responsibility” for the Cambridge Analytica scan-
dal when CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress next week.
But even as Feinstein bemoaned Trump’s leadership — and faces a vigorous primary challenge from the left this year — she’s shrugging off accusations from Democratic activists that she’s not tough enough on the president. While other California politicians have excoriated the former reality star in increasingly harsh terms, she’s tried to work with him.
“I’m not in the namecalling business,” she said. “How does it help me get anything done?”
Feinstein also argued that there was “nothing wrong” with her controversial statement last summer that Trump “could be a good president” if he learns more and changes his approach — which drew condemnations from her primary challenger, State Sen. Kevin de León, and other Democrats. Nearly two-thirds of the state Democratic Party delegates voted not to endorse her at the party convention in February.
Feinstein said she had some hope that Trump’s upcoming summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un could come to a breakthrough in relations with the nuclear-armed dictatorship.
“If the president can go and sit down and have a good relationship with Kim Jong-Un and work out an agreement to make the peninsula nuclear-free, it’s a much safer world,” she said, estimating that there was a “50-50” chance the two leaders could come to an agreement.
But later, she noted that “they’re both a little bit the same way — potentially explosive people.”
Feinstein is also pushing for an assault weapons ban, and says that she hopes Republican Senate leadership will at least allow a hearing for the bill. She was inspired by the outpouring of young people marching and protesting for gun control last month, she said.
“I have never seen young America as good as it is today,” Feinstein said.
Gun control has formed a critical, complex part of Feintstein’s decadeslong political career. After a gunman walked into a San Francisco law firm and killed eight people in July 1993, then first-term Feinstein channeled national horror to champion an assault weapons ban into law.
But a sunset provision — deemed a crucial mistake by gun control advocates — allowed the ban to expire in 2004. Feinstein is again at the center of a national debate over guns, pushing for additional regulations.
At an earlier event Monday at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s Fireside Chat Monday, Feinstein told 300 business leaders and students that the student activism gave her hope for her bill.
In attendance Monday were four Prospect High School students who are advocating for gun control in their communities. Last month, hundreds of thousands of young people joined the national March for Our Lives calling for stricter gun control following a shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 students and faculty. The grassroots political movement — led by Parkland students like Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg — has stirred hundreds of thousands of young Americans in particular, hungry to incite change.
“If the young people of America stand up and continue what they have begun, we are going to continue to march, ladies and gentlemen, until we get this assault weapons ban once and for all,” Feinstein said at the event.
She said the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut — in which 20 children and six staff members were fatally shot — should have been a turning point in the national gun control debate.
“I took a look at the 6and 7-year-old faces at Sandy Hook and I thought, no one is ever going to do this again,” she said. “Guess what? There have been 200 school shootings since Sandy Hook, with 400 children and/or adults killed in those shootings.”
Feinstein also said Congress may have to pass a bill to protect the DACA program and override Trump’s veto.
“I think there’s so much support for this and it’s so tragic because I hear from schools that young people are now in hiding,” she said. “I’ve heard from universities that they’re not showing up.”
During her 45-minute address inside Juniper Networks’ Aspiration Dome, Feinstein touched on housing and transportation in the Bay Area, cybersecurity, homelessness and gun control.
The senator, addressing the Bay Area’s growing traffic woes, said she supports Regional Measure 3, a ballot measure that would finance $4.45 billion in highway and transit improvements through toll increases across the region’s seven state-owned toll bridges.