At The Federalist, Christopher Bedford has a graceful, well-researched item about the dilemma facing Democrats with Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California's incapacitation from shingles at the age of 89: That to get her out of there, they need to enlist the help of Republicans so they can fill her seat on the judiciary committee to get the Democrat judges nominated by Joe Biden through confirmation.

He explains it out this way:

Her mental decline has been known on Capitol Hill for years, with staff guiding her around the halls, and yet still just this year Sen. Chuck Schumer decided to let her remain on the Senate committee responsible for accomplishing the president’s judicial agenda.

 

She served on that committee until early March. Then finally, after six weeks away recovering from shingles, her California colleague, Rep. Ro Khanna, publicly called for her resignation. Democrats like Khanna had grown weary — between Feinstein and Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, the party’s judicial agenda had been stalled since the top of March.

 

Hours after Khanna’s tweet, she asked to be temporarily replaced in her duties on the essential committee. Democrats are eager to comply.

 

But are Republicans so eager? They shouldn’t be. There’s zero reason — zero — that Republicans should cooperate with Schumer and the president on their judicial agenda, either tactically, politically, or even morally.

 

Republicans have the power, too: Committee assignments are decided at the beginning of the session, either by unanimous consent or, if contested, by the vote of at least 60 senators. Democrats certainly hope they can just brush this through under the former, but what reason does Sen. Josh Hawley, or maybe Sen. Mike Lee, or Sen. J.D. Vance have to let that one pass them by?

Seems the Democrat masterplan of filling every elected office with Democrats, by fair means or foul, and whether they are fit or fading, hasn't worked out very well for them. 

Pennsylvania's Sen. John Fetterman, who's just completed a stretch in a mental hospital for depression, and who reportedly cannot understand a thing anyone is saying to him owing to a stroke, is the most commonly cited example, but there is also the open-air senility of Joe Biden, showing on television screens every night how badly his mental faculties have declined. Feinstein, though, seems to be in the worst shape -- she literally can't do anything. Because she holds a critical seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, her absence is keeping Democrats from confirming their radical judges and that seems to be a problem for them.

Feinstein won't resign, despite calls for that from Democrats such as Bay Area Rep. Ro Khanna, but she has asked that her seat be temporarily filled by another Democrat, and for that, she needs Republicans to give the O.K.

Now, in the past, this would have been done as a collegial courtesy, Bedford noted. 

But he argues that that was in the old days, well before the Senate judiciary spectacles around the confirmation hearings of Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Judge Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court (Sen. Joe Biden presiding), as well as a slew of other disgusting stunts pulled by Democrats in the name of 'hain't I got the power?'

That means payback is the only acceptable response. Republicans should not cooperate with their request, because Democrats have not extended similar courtesies or even basic civility to Republicans and keeping crazed leftists off the bench is their job anyway.

Bedford worries that dolts like Sen. Mitt Romney might go for it, but the committed Republicans among them must not. He argues that they owe Democrats nothing for their past shenanigans, and they have nothing to lose by giving them nothing.

Personally, I have always thought that my vote for Sen. Dianne Feinstein in the last Senate race was the best of a choice of two Democrats on the ballot that I could have possibly made. The ailing Feinstein was very left-wing and annoyed us mightily with her nasty questioning of Judge Amy Coney Barrett when she was nominated to the Supreme Court. But the seemingly healthy alternative on the ballot was Kevin de Leon, an AOC-style leftist and proud son of illegal aliens who would have been a long-lasting nightmare, entrenched in office as they always are. De Leon was last seen making racist remarks about blacks with members and allies in the Los Angeles City Council last year.

Feinstein won, apparently scarfing up a lot of Republican votes because of the alternative, and we have since been rewarded by a judiciary committee that can't even get leftists through the confirmation process now. It's almost like winning for real in rock-hard rigged blue California as far as Republicans consider it. Democrats own this, and it's bitten them on the butt. Republicans shouldn't do anything to soften their 'ouch.'   

Read the whole thing here.

Image: Pax Ahimsa Gethen, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0