After Kamala Harris was sworn in because the junior senator from California in 2017, Senator Dianne Feinstein pulled her into a personal hideaway off the Senate flooring.
There, Vice President Harris recalled on Thursday, Ms. Feinstein handed her a glass of California chardonnay and a binder stuffed with draft payments — the beginning of a partnership on behalf of their state.
“Dianne, the ladies of America have come a great distance,” Ms. Harris stated. “Our nation has come a great distance. You helped transfer the ball ahead, and our nation salutes you, Dianne.”
There have been only a few girls within the Senate when Ms. Feinstein arrived in 1992, and she or he made a degree of welcoming those that got here after her. She helped coordinate non-public group dinners, doled out presents so steadily that one senator jokingly feared complimenting a handbag or scarf and introduced her colleagues with watercolor work of flowers.
At one level, she phoned a few of the different girls within the Senate to get their measurements, so she might purchase seersucker suits for one of many traditional sartorial Senate traditions in the summertime. (At the very least one senator stated she nonetheless owns that go well with.)
Ms. Harris and different veterans of the Senate additionally described Ms. Feinstein’s rigor when it got here to her legislative work on a few of the chamber’s strongest committees, together with the Senate Intelligence Committee and Judiciary Committee.
“If there was the smallest little bit of frequent floor, she’d pursue it if it meant transferring a difficulty ahead — even whereas being to date forward of her time on gun security, marriage equality, girls’s rights, the atmosphere and so many different points,” stated Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the bulk chief.
He added, “Dianne Feinstein was the dwelling embodiment of what the Senate ought to all the time be — an establishment constructed on cooperation.”
Mr. Schumer, the primary Jewish individual to function Senate majority chief, recalled how Ms. Feinstein made a degree of bringing his daughter together with her to Excessive Holy Days companies after she moved to San Francisco. And he credited her with making certain that his daughters grew up in a world the place extra girls had been in positions of energy.
“Due to Dianne, my daughters grew up in a world that’s a bit of bit fairer, a bit of extra simply and extra accepting of ladies in management,” he stated.
