Apr 12, 2008 -- CQ Weekly: Working Hard and Playing by the Rules
By: Catharine Richert

If the Internet is a sign of progress, then Dianne Feinstein -- for all her reputation as a moderate with a pronounced bipartisan conciliatory streak -- probably stands as the Senate's leading progressive. For the 15 months she has wielded the gavel at the Rules and Administration Committee, she has vigorously advocated for all things electronic. At times, this initiative can make her duties as the "mayor of the Senate," as her chairmanship is known, take on a near-parental cast: One of her pet causes, for example, is changing the Senate rules to regulate how her colleagues can use their official Web sites to interact with social networking tools such as MySpace and Facebook.

Such efforts may not seem like the most pressing Senate business, but the California Democrat has embraced them as part of a broader drive to bring her colleagues, the voting process and the campaign system into the 21st century. Along the way, she's also poised to redefine perceptions of the Rules Committee, which isn't generally known for driving cutting-edge changes of the chamber's daily business -- and to make the chairmanship something of a power center in its own right. For the past two decades, her predecessors have used the job for other purposes: either as a landing pad after a top job was denied them, as with Mississippi's Trent Lott, the former majority leader, or as a launching pad for a more prominent post, as with the current majority leader, Kentucky's Mitch McConnell.

But Feinstein's aggressive approach to her panel's legislative agenda could change its reputation, and it's already serving to bolster hers. Take the electronic filing of senatorial campaign finance forms, one of Feinstein's signature issues. Although presidential and House candidates adopted the practice years back, Feinstein has been unable to get a bill mandating it onto the Senate floor for debate. But she's nonetheless won praise from campaign finance watchdog groups and journalists' organizations, who applaud her for pushing as hard as she has. Similar bills introduced in the two previous Congresses never got out of the committee, mainly because Lott opposed them. Feinstein, in contrast, held hearings on the issue soon after taking over Rules and pushed her bill through the committee a year ago.

Feinstein's focus these days on the day-to-day bureaucratic operations of the Senate is also something of an anomaly at the Capitol, where the vast majority of lawmakers are concerned instead about having a legislative impact either nationally or in the states and cities they represent. There's minimal political gain to be derived back home from touting an initiative that made Capitol Hill, already so low in the public's estimation, run more efficiently. Instead, the principal beneficiaries of such an effort are other lawmakers, who are eager to have their creature comforts catered to and their office real estate needs met, even if they don't pay much attention to all the work that goes into accommodating them.

"There are some things I'd rather not be responsible for," Feinstein said, "like who gets a hideaway or who gets additional office space."

But she is nonetheless well positioned to take on the more obdurate challenges of the Rules chairmanship. For one thing, she's comfortably settled into a third full term, having won re-election in 2006 by a 24 percentage point margin. For another, she derives great satisfaction in making the legislative system operate more smoothly, say her supporters. When she was the mayor of San Francisco, from 1978 until 1989, Feinstein "got deeply involved in the bricks-and-mortar aspect of city government, identifying problems and then solving them," said Howard Gantman, the committee's chief of staff. "She enjoys her job as chairman in the same way."

People don't generally associate life in the Senate with glamour, but even so, the Rules chairmanship ranks as one of the chamber's least glamorous titles. Its members generally tend to essential but humdrum bureaucratic matters such as the paying of senator's official expenses, the operation of the barbershops, cafeterias and other services, the administration of the chamber's often vague rules, and dealings with other parts of the legislative branch, such as the printers of the Congressional Record. Once a decade or so, the panel will investigate a contested Senate elections and thereby generate some headlines. Otherwise, the chairman's most glamorous job comes once every four years: serving as the master of ceremonies for presidential inaugurals.

But it's typically one power the panel wields -- over Senate office space -- that stirs other senators to try to curry favor with the Rules chair, hoping to engage in some of the customary mutual back-scratching that can result in each senator getting a favor, or maybe even a vote, that he wants. Interest in Capitol real estate is heightened now, with the long-delayed and over-budget visitors' center now set to open in November. The Senate Rules Committee will have jurisdiction over half the space and operations of the giant underground facility, which also has plenty of square feet set aside for congressional operations rather than tourism.

"There's supposed to be a regular order" for giving out office space, said Lott, the Rules chairman for four years, who resigned his Senate seat in December to become a lobbyist. "But there are things you can do if one member needs more room. And he or she will be very happy if you can do that for them."

Cultivating good will and applying plenty of elbow grease to the job can pay off. Wendell H. Ford of Kentucky leveraged his chairmanship into election as Democratic whip in 1990, a job he held for eight years until his retirement. "The Rules chairmanship is a very important steppingstone to leadership," said Senate historian Donald A. Ritchie. "It's not a coincidence that chairmen of the Rules Committee go on to leadership positions."

But Feinstein, who has a somewhat iconoclastic voting record, is not regarded as a likely party leader, so Rules could be as high as she goes for the foreseeable future. Although she holds subcommittee chairmanships at both, she ranks ninth in seniority on Appropriations and fifth on Judiciary.

While demurring on some of her most parochial and bureaucratic duties, Feinstein is emphasizing instead her interest in the panel's legislative jurisdiction over voting rights and campaign regulation, issues not stressed on Lott's watch. This year, she's held hearings into options for regulating "robocalls" -- the preA-recorded political pitches that plague voters during campaign season -- and into whether laws to tighten proof-of-identity rules before voting have gone too far (she thinks they have).

Her desire to set new guidelines for the way senators' official Web sites may interact with Facebook and MySpace pages falls within her panel's jurisdiction over both Senate rules and campaign finance, since Feinstein's concern is that senators might be able to use links to social networking sites to raise campaign money without proper oversight or disclosure. She also shares a concern, which the House has also been struggling to address, that senators' Web sites can link to advertising-filled Web pages of sites such as YouTube, where many lawmakers now want to post videos of themselves.

But probably the highest-profile measure that's come out of Feinstein's committee is her legislation to mandate that Senate candidates file their campaign finance disclosure reports electronically. Currently, handwritten or typed reports are collected by the secretary of the Senate, who digitally scans them into non-searchable PDF files before forwarding them to the Federal Election Commission. Feinstein contends that the current antiquated system is also unnecessarily costly, at $250,000 a year. Feinstein says a computerized filing system would cost less and be more in line with the open-government practices of all other federal candidates. "It's simply a concession to the modern age," she said.

That isn't, however, how it's been greeted by her Senate colleagues.

The measure was nearly scuttled in committee when the top Republican, Robert F. Bennett of Utah, tried to offer an unrelated amendment that would have opened a huge and controversial new avenue for campaign fundraising. Feinstein ultimately talked Bennett into withdrawing that amendment by agreeing to hold a hearing on the issue. But that didn't close the door on dissension over the measure, by any means.

When the bill was ready to come to the floor last June, Republicans served notice that they wanted to amend it with what the measure's advocates saw as a "poison pill": language that, according to Stephen Weissman, associate director of policy for the Campaign Finance Institute, would have required charities or nonprofits to reveal their own financial donors if they filed ethics complaints against senators.

"This is a reflection of the fact that elected officials don't like giving the public access to the information," Paul Ryan, who coordinates the Campaign Legal Center's initiatives in monitoring restraining the influence of money in elections, said of the impasse over the bill.

Republican leaders deny any intent to kill the measure. Instead, they say, they only want to use it as a vehicle to ensure that the advocates of a fuller disclosure bill abide by the same set of rules themselves. "Transparency goes both ways," said a top GOP Senate aide.

The stalemate has probably doomed the bill for the year. But backers of the measure say that if anyone can get it through in the end, it's Feinstein. Says Weissman: "This was one of the first things she did; she was able to persuade Bennett, and then she alertly got to the floor and tried to bring this up."