Politics
Column: These 80-something senators are gliding to reelection. Did Feinstein face a double standard?
In 2018, Dianne Feinstein was elected to her fifth full U.S. Senate term. She was 85.
Her opponent, Kevin de León, was more than 30 years younger and made Feinstein’s age a central part of his campaign. “Time for a change,” he told voters. Time for “a new voice that expresses the values of California today, not yesterday.”
After winning, Feinstein spent her final years suffering a much-chronicled physical and cognitive decline. She faced incessant calls to quit, which the Democrat studiously ignored, dying hours after a last vote on the Senate floor. She was 90.
Angus King and Bernie Sanders, two geriatric members of the U.S. Senate, are now up for reelection, seeking their third and fourth terms, respectively. King would be 86 and Sanders 89 in January 2031 when those terms expire.
Both are independents who caucus with Democrats. Each is heavily favored to win in November.
“I’d be stupified if he did not,” Chris Potholm, an emeritus professor at Maine’s Bowdoin College, said of King.
“Unbeatable” was how the University of Vermont’s Garrison Nelson described Sanders. “He’s as solid as can be in the race.”
As the two oldest presidential candidates in history battle for the White House — and President Biden, in particular, faces persistent questions about his mental and physical acuity — it’s striking how little the longevity of the two incumbent senators seems to matter in their reelection bids.
“I have not seen any pushback on Sen. King related to his age,” said Amy Fried, an emerita political science professor at the University of Maine.
The same goes for Sanders, who suffered a heart attack in 2019 during his second run for president.
“I don’t think the age factor is significant enough to threaten his reelection,” said Matthew Dickinson of Vermont’s Middlebury College.
That’s in part because voters typically view political offices through different lenses.
They are “significantly more accepting of an aging person in a legislative position, being one of a hundred in the Senate, or one of 435 in the House, than in an executive post,” said Charlie Cook, who has spent decades handicapping elections nationwide.
“While being a senator or congressman is a more demanding job than many think … it is nothing like being the chief executive.”
That said, was there another standard — a double standard — applied to Feinstein, as an 80-something-going-on-90 woman serving in a body that is still very much a men’s club?
Many of her defenders thought so. Among examples, they pointed to the deference shown Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and John McCain after they were diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Both stayed in office and were gone from Washington for extended periods receiving medical care. Neither faced the hue and cry that enveloped Feinstein.
The glide paths that King and Sanders are following to reelection would also seem to underscore the notion that Feinstein, their generational peer, was treated more harshly based on her gender.
But there are important distinctions.
Not least, there is no evidence that either King or Sanders suffer the obvious impairments that plagued Feinstein during her final years in office, which were marked by several prolonged absences owing to health issues.
King “has a wicked hard schedule,” said Potholm, who has written a half dozen books on Maine politics. “Talk to him for five minutes and you’ll see he’s sharp as a tack.”
Sanders “shows no slippage, no discernible stuttering or muttering or age-related disconnect,” said Nelson, who has known the senator for more than half a century, going back to Sanders’ rabble-rousing days as a repeatedly unsuccessful candidate for statewide office.
Size also matters.
Maine, with 1.4 million residents, and Vermont, with 650,000, are small states, in both size and population. That makes it easy for voters to get to know politicians on a personal level, forging a connection that’s not possible in California, where politics tend to be more transactional — as in, what have you done for me lately?
Much of the agita surrounding Feinstein stemmed from her stance on policy, particularly from those on the left who long considered the former San Francisco mayor too moderate for their taste. They sought to pressure her into quitting so Gov. Gavin Newsom could appoint someone more reliably liberal.
As Feinstein’s health teetered, the stakes were heightened by the Senate’s near-even split.
She chaired the Judiciary Committee until concerns about her fitness forced her to relinquish the post two years after reelection. She stayed on the committee, but her absences jeopardized Democrats’ ability to confirm Biden’s judicial nominees.
That, and not Feinstein’s gender, made her age “get a lot more of the spotlight” than it might have under different circumstances, said Michele Swers, a Georgetown professor who has authored two books on women in Congress.
In February 2023, Feinstein had the good sense to announce she would not seek another term, clearing the way for a robust campaign to succeed her. When she died last September, Newsom appointed Laphonza Butler as a caretaker.
At 45 — a youngster, by Senate standards — Butler had this to say about King and Sanders: “Every 80-year-old isn’t the same.”
Moreover, she told Politico, “To judge one person, or five people, or two people based on the number on their birth certificate is probably not the best representation of American freedom.”
But don’t take her word, or anyone else’s. It’s up to voters in Maine and Vermont, who’ll have the final say in November.
In what might be the most decisive critique yet of President Trump’s remake of the Kennedy Center, the Washington National Opera’s board approved a resolution on Friday to leave the venue it has occupied since 1971.
“Today, the Washington National Opera announced its decision to seek an amicable early termination of its affiliation agreement with the Kennedy Center and resume operations as a fully independent nonprofit entity,” the company said in a statement to the Associated Press.
Roma Daravi, Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations, described the relationship with Washington National Opera as “financially challenging.”
“After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to part ways with the WNO due to a financially challenging relationship,” Daravi said in a statement. “We believe this represents the best path forward for both organizations and enables us to make responsible choices that support the financial stability and long-term future of the Trump Kennedy Center.”
Kennedy Center President Ambassador Richard Grenell tweeted that the call was made by the Kennedy Center, writing that its leadership had “approached the Opera leadership last year with this idea and they began to be open to it.”
“Having an exclusive relationship has been extremely expensive and limiting in choice and variety,” Grenell wrote. “We have spent millions of dollars to support the Washington Opera’s exclusivity and yet they were still millions of dollars in the hole – and getting worse.”
WNO’s decision to vacate the Kennedy Center’s 2,364-seat Opera House comes amid a wave of artist cancellations that came after the venue’s board voted to rename the center the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. New signage featuring Trump’s name went up on the building’s exterior just days after the vote while debate raged over whether an official name change could be made without congressional approval.
That same day, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) — an ex officio member of the board — wrote on social media that the vote was not unanimous and that she and others who might have voiced their dissent were muted on the call.
Grenell countered that ex officio members don’t get a vote.
Cancellations soon began to mount — as did Kennedy Center‘s rebukes against the artists who chose not to appear. Jazz drummer Chuck Redd pulled out of his annual Christmas Eve concert; jazz supergroup the Cookers nixed New Year’s Eve shows; New York-based Doug Varone and Dancers dropped out of April performances; and Grammy Award-winning banjo player Béla Fleck wrote on social media that he would no longer play at the venue in February.
WNO’s departure, however, represents a new level of artist defection. The company’s name is synonymous with the Kennedy Center and it has served as an artistic center of gravity for the complex since the building first opened.
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Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is leveling a stunning accusation at Vice President JD Vance amid the national furor over this week’s fatal shooting in Minnesota involving an ICE agent.
“I understand that Vice President Vance believes that shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not,” the four-term federal lawmaker from New York and progressive champion argued as she answered questions on Friday on Capitol Hill from Fox News and other news organizations.
Ocasio-Cortez spoke in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting death of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good after she confronted ICE agents from inside her car in Minneapolis.
RENEE NICOLE GOOD PART OF ‘ICE WATCH’ GROUP, DHS SOURCES SAY
Members of law enforcement work the scene following a suspected shooting by an ICE agent during federal operations on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Video of the incident instantly went viral, and while Democrats have heavily criticized the shooting, the Trump administration is vocally defending the actions of the ICE agent.
HEAD HERE FOR LIVE FOX NEWS UPDATES ON THE ICE SHOOTING IN MINNESOTA
Vance, at a White House briefing on Thursday, charged that “this was an attack on federal law enforcement. This was an attack on law and order.”
“That woman was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation,” the vice president added. “The president stands with ICE, I stand with ICE, we stand with all of our law enforcement officers.”
And Vance claimed Good was “brainwashed” and suggested she was connected to a “broader, left-wing network.”
Federal sources told Fox News on Friday that Good, who was a mother of three, worked as a Minneapolis-based immigration activist serving as a member of “ICE Watch.”
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Ocasio-Cortez, in responding to Vance’s comments, said, “That is a fundamental difference between Vice President Vance and I. I do not believe that the American people should be assassinated in the street.”
But a spokesperson for the vice president, responding to Ocasio-Cortez’s accusation, told Fox News Digital, “On National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, AOC made it clear she thinks that radical leftists should be able to mow down ICE officials in broad daylight. She should be ashamed of herself. The Vice President stands with ICE and the brave men and women of law enforcement, and so do the American people.”
In Springfield, Ill., in 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln delivered a powerful speech decrying the “ravages of mob law” throughout the land. Lincoln warned, in eerily prescient fashion, that the spread of a then-ascendant “mobocratic spirit” threatened to sever the “attachment of the People” to their fellow countrymen and their nation. Lincoln’s opposition to anarchy of any kind was absolute and clarion: “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”
Unfortunately, it seems that every few years, Americans must be reminded anew of Lincoln’s wisdom. This week’s lethal Immigration and Customs Enforcement standoff in the Twin Cities is but the latest instance of a years-long baleful trend.
On Wednesday, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mom, Renee Nicole Good, was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Her ex-husband said she and her partner encountered ICE agents after dropping off Good’s 6-year-old at school. The federal government has called Good’s encounter “an act of domestic terrorism” and said the agent shot in self-defense.
Suffice it to say Minnesota’s Democratic establishment does not see it this way.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey responded to the deployment of 2,000 immigration agents in the area and the deadly encounter by telling ICE to “get the f— out” of Minnesota, while Gov. Tim Walz called the shooting “totally predictable” and “totally avoidable.” Frey, who was also mayor during the mayhem after George Floyd’s murder by city police in 2020, has lent succor to the anti-ICE provocateurs, seemingly encouraging them to make Good a Floyd-like martyr. As for Walz, he’s right that this tragedy was eminently “avoidable” — but not only for the reasons he thinks. If the Biden-Harris administration hadn’t allowed unvetted immigrants to remain in the country without legal status and if Walz’s administration hadn’t moved too slowly in its investigations of hundreds of Minnesotans — of mixed immigration status — defrauding taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars, ICE never would have embarked on this particular operation.
National Democrats took the rage even further. Following the fateful shooting, the Democratic Party’s official X feed promptly tweeted, without any morsel of nuance, that “ICE shot and killed a woman on camera.” This sort of irresponsible fear-mongering already may have prompted a crazed activist to shoot three detainees at an ICE facility in Dallas last September while targeting officers; similar dehumanizing rhetoric about the National Guard perhaps also played a role in November’s lethal shooting of a soldier in Washington, D.C.
Liberals and open-border activists play with fire when they so casually compare ICE, as Walz previously has, to a “modern-day Gestapo.” The fact is, ICE is not the Gestapo, Donald Trump is not Hitler, and Charlie Kirk was not a goose-stepping brownshirt. To pretend otherwise is to deprive words of meaning and to live in the theater of the absurd.
But as dangerous as this rhetoric is for officers and agents, it is the moral blackmail and “mobocratic spirit” of it all that is even more harmful to the rule of law.
The implicit threat of all “sanctuary” jurisdictions, whose resistance to aiding federal law enforcement smacks of John C. Calhoun-style antebellum “nullification,” is to tell the feds not to operate and enforce federal law in a certain area — or else. The result is crass lawlessness, Mafia-esque shakedown artistry and a fetid neo-confederate stench combined in one dystopian package.
The truth is that swaths of the activist left now engage in these sorts of threats as a matter of course. In 2020, the left’s months-long rioting following the death of Floyd led to upward of $2 billion in insurance claims. In 2021, they threatened the same rioting unless Derek Chauvin, the officer who infamously kneeled on Floyd’s neck, was found guilty of murder (which he was, twice). In 2022, following the unprecedented (and still unsolved) leak of the draft majority opinion in the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case, abortion-rights activists protested outside many of the right-leaning justices’ homes, perhaps hoping to induce them to change their minds and flip their votes. And now, ICE agents throughout the country face threats of violence — egged on by local Democratic leaders — simply for enforcing federal law.
In “The Godfather,” Luca Brasi referred to this sort of thuggery as making someone an offer that he can’t refuse. We might also think of it as Lincoln’s dreaded “ravages of mob law.”
Regardless, a free republic cannot long endure like this. The rule of law cannot be held hostage to the histrionic temper tantrums of a radical ideological flank. The law must be enforced solemnly, without fear or favor. There can be no overarching blackmail lurking in the background — no Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of a free people, ready to crash down on us all if a certain select few do not get their way.
The proper recourse for changing immigration law — or any federal law — is to lobby Congress to do so, or to make a case in federal court. The ginned-up martyrdom complex that leads some to take matters into their own hands is a recipe for personal and national ruination. There is nothing good down that road — only death, despair and mobocracy.
Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. X: @josh_hammer
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Ideas expressed in the piece
- Democrats and activist left are perpetuating a dangerous “mobocratic spirit” similar to the mob law that Lincoln warned against in 1838, which threatens the rule of law and national unity[1]
- The federal government’s characterization of the incident as self-defense by an ICE agent is appropriate, while local Democratic leaders are irresponsibly encouraging anti-ICE protesters to view Good as a martyr figure like George Floyd[1]
- Dehumanizing rhetoric comparing ICE to the Gestapo is reckless fear-mongering that has inspired actual violence, including a shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas and the fatal shooting of a National Guard soldier[1]
- The shooting was “avoidable” not because of ICE’s presence, but because the Biden-Harris administration allowed undocumented immigrants to remain in the country without legal status and state authorities moved too slowly investigating immigrant fraud[1]
- Sanctuary jurisdictions that resist federal law enforcement represent neo-confederate “nullification” and constitute crass lawlessness and Mafia-style extortion, effectively telling federal agents they cannot enforce the law or face consequences[1]
- The activist left employs threats of violence as systematic blackmail, evidenced by 2020 riots following Floyd’s death, threats surrounding the Chauvin trial, protests at justices’ homes during the abortion debate, and now threats against ICE agents[1]
- Changing immigration policy must occur through Congress or federal courts, not through mob rule and “ginned-up martyrdom complexes” that lead to personal and national ruination[1]
Different views on the topic
- Community members who knew Good rejected characterizations of her as a domestic terrorist, with her mother describing her as “one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” “extremely compassionate,” and someone “who has taken care of people all her life”[1]
- Vigil speakers and attendees portrayed Good as peacefully present to watch the situation and protect her neighbors, with an organizer stating “She was peaceful; she did the right thing” and “She died because she loved her neighbors”[1]
- A speaker identified only as Noah explicitly rejected the federal government’s domestic terrorism characterization, saying Good was present “to watch the terrorists,” not participate in terrorism[1]
- Neighbors described Good as a loving mother and warm family member who was an award-winning poet and positive community presence, suggesting her presence during the incident reflected civic concern rather than radicalism[1]
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