Sen. Dianne Feinstein remembered as champion of public lands, fearless advocate for gun control

That legislation faced long odds, said Thompson, “because the House was controlled by Republicans, and the Chairman of the Natural Resources Committee” — Rep. Richard Pombo, a mining lobbyist from Tracy — “didn’t like wilderness legislation. It was a really heavy lift to get him to bring the bill up for a vote.”

With Feinstein leaning in, the wilderness bill passed in the House, “and Dianne took it from there. She got the bill passed (in the Senate), and President (George W.) Bush signed it into law.”

Feinstein’s effectiveness, Bosco believes, was due to her being viewed as a moderate. “She was very considered in her approach, and had a strong reputation for integrity, so people were comfortable getting behind her,” he said.

Taking on the gun lobby

Feinstein left an indelible imprint on numerous other issues.

“Of course the assassination of Harvey Milk had a major impact on her,” said Bosco, who noted Feinstein’s decadeslong efforts to pass common sense gun reform. In 1994, just her second year in the Senate, she wrote a landmark law banning assault weapons. The legislation passed and was signed by President Bill Clinton, but expired after 10 years.

She realized then that we needed to do much more to prevent gun violence, and she went after it,” said Thompson, leader of the Democrats’ House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force.

“And they went after her,” he added, referring to the powerful gun lobby. “But she was fine with that. She never allowed herself to be bullied or pushed around.”

Another example of that fearlessness, said Thompson, was Feinstein’s work as Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which in 2014 released a damning report exposing the CIA’s systematic use of torture of terrorist suspects in secret overseas prisons in the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“She took on two administrations — Bush and Obama — along with the CIA,” said Thompson. “But she wasn’t going to bend. No one was going to run over her. She was always going to do what was right.”

Rift with environmentalists

Those beliefs fueled her drive to protect the coast from offshore drilling and promote the use of cleaner cars.

During her three-decade Senate tenure, critics have pointed out, she drifted from environmentalists when it came California’s ever-present water battles — and the impact of development and human demands on important fisheries.

Huffman attributed her shift to lessons learned from her 1990 loss to then-Republican candidate Pete Wilson in a hard-fought race for governor. He garnered more than 49% of the vote to her nearly 46%. She carried most coastal and Bay Area counties, but lacked support in the state’s sprawling middle, dominated politically by agribusiness interests.

“The takeaway that I believe she had,” said Huffman, “was that she needed to shore up support in the Central Valley and the San Joaquin Valley.”

Feinstein “made a big play” to court those voters, he recalled, “and the big irrigation interests became a critical part of her support.”

What that boiled down to, according to some activists, was that Feinstein embraced policies unfriendly to fishery and environmental interests. Where they took the side of the fish — imperiled salmon stocks in particular — seeking higher water flows in rivers and streams, Feinstein often sided with the farming interests who were trying to store water, and weaken Endangered Species Act protections for salmon in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river watersheds, activists recalled.

“I worked as an ally with Sen. Feinstein on a lot of things,” said Huffman, “but with the Bay Delta I was always in her doghouse.”

In Feinstein’s latter years, conceded Glen Spain, acting executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, “she was not as much a champion as we would have liked.”

One example involved an 18-year fight over restoration of the San Joaquin River, which went mostly dry along about 60 miles of the main stem after the 1942 completion of Friant Dam, which impounds Millerton Lake near Fresno.

The National Resources Defense Council — where Huffman was a senior attorney before becoming a lawmaker — sued the Bureau of Reclamation for violation of state and federal law requiring dams be operated so that downstream conditions remain supportive of fish.

Feinstein, at first, defended the storage of water, even if it came at the expense of fish.

But once the NRDC negotiated a settlement with the Bureau of Reclamation and water users, she championed legislation to affirm it as law, providing additional downstream flows and other provisions to benefit fish.

“I think it’s a globally significant effort,” said Barry Nelson, a Bay Area policy analyst and consultant who once worked for NRDC and led the San Joaquin River campaign. “I don’t know of an effort similar to that literally brought a dead river back to life. San Joaquin River was dead. It was dry in most years.”

“I saw firsthand what an enormously effective legislator she was, and I don’t say that lightly,” he said.

But overall, policies in her tenure have contributed to the decline of fisheries, notably the West Coast salmon fishery, which this year is closed due to poor stocks. Most of the salmon caught off the central and northern California coasts are reared in the Sacramento-San Joaquin river systems, so degradation of conditions there means fewer spawning adults and lower populations.

Spain, with the San Francisco-based fishermen’s federation, said he still considers Feinstein “a friend to the fishing industry.“

“She will be much missed,” he said. “It’s very important who replaces her. But she will be a hard act to follow.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan (she/her) at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.