ShareThisBy CAROLYN LOCHHEAD
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer are charting a course change on everything from global warming to tough confirmation hearings for the incoming defense secretary as they catapult to power in the Senate.
Alternately moderate and confrontational, as befits their political personae, the two women first elected to the Senate in 1992 are central beneficiaries of Tuesday's political earthquake that gave Democrats a monopoly on Capitol Hill.
Republican Sen. George Allen's concession Thursday to Democratic challenger Jim Webb in their close contest in Virginia gave Senate Democrats their 49th seat and, with the backing of independents Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, provides them a 51-49 majority in the new Congress.
Nowhere is the change starker than with Boxer's impending chairwomanship of the Environment and Public Works Committee, where she takes the reins from a conservative Republican who thinks global warming is a hoax.
She vowed to push through global warming legislation next year, taking California's landmark model nationwide _ a move Feinstein proposed in a major speech in August in San Francisco.
Boxer, describing global warming as the challenge of this generation, rattled off the potential dire consequences from a projected 3.7-degree rise in the Earth's temperature, including a melting of the polar ice caps and a 20-foot rise in sea levels along California's coasts. She said she would bring "everybody to the table to come up with a sense of legislation ... because time is running out."
Among the Senate's severest critics of Bush, Boxer said the administration had already extended an olive branch, with a top aide from the President's Council on Environmental Quality contacting her staff indicating a willingness to work together.
"In five minutes, (former Defense Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld resigned, and in 10 minutes we got a call on global warming, so change is in the air," Boxer said.
She acknowledged that she may face resistance even from some Democrats in the Senate and House.
"If I had my way, I would go all 100 yards to do what we need to do," Boxer said. "But if people are willing to go 90 or 80 or 70, we'll find out. But the call from the White House means this is a very different world we're living in."
Feinstein, for her part, warned that Bush's new nominee for secretary of defense, Robert Gates, faces a Senate grilling on Iraq.
While Congress will not cut off money for the war, given the presence of U.S. troops there, Feinstein said, "I think there will certainly be hearings and there will certainly be great discussion on what should be done and I think it will begin with confirmation hearings of the nominee for the secretary. He's going to have to put forth in his nomination hearing what he thinks he would do."
Rumsfeld wasn't solely responsible for Iraq policy, Feinstein said, "but he certainly played a big role in it."
"Transformation of the military is Donald Rumsfeld," she said. "Too few troops is Donald Rumsfeld. The taxing now of the U.S. Army is a product of Donald Rumsfeld's policies, so this all has to be changed."
