[NewMountain]

For those living in California: https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/e-mail-me

A copy of my note if you would like a template:

``` Dear Senator Feinstein,

I am deeply disappointed with your support of the EARN IT act and am expressing my deep concern and disapproval of such a bill.

Congruent with the recent report released by Stanford, I am expressing my deep disappointment in your sponsorship of the EARN IT act. I believe it represents a fundamental undermining of citizens right to privacy through strong encryption under the extremely divisive framing of "protecting the children". As a Father of two children myself, I do not believe that whatever incremental improvement to their safety, if any at all, justifies the undermining of encryption of ordinary citizens. In my opinion, this law actively undermines the fourth amendment in the digital realm and I must state that if you believe this is in my best interest, you have lost both my vote and my trust. ```

[bsder]

Sadly, Feinstein doesn't give one iota of damn ... unless she is being wiretapped.

And, at this point, I'm not sure that she actually even knows what she is doing. However, too many people are on the gravy train that are preventing her from resigning.

[tagoregrtst]

Feinstein is the senator I dislike the most. Even after she complained like a baby that the FBI had surveilled her (what did she expect?) it didn't affect her political positions one bit.

She cant loose the elections because shes a Dem from CA. She cant get primaried because shes in the hands of the SV

[bsder]

> She cant loose the elections because shes a Dem from CA. She cant get primaried because shes in the hands of the SV

It sounds like you need to do some research about California politics.

Feinstein is by no means untouchable. And more of her support comes from Hollywood and old media than from SV. However, she does have a core in San Francisco given that's where she wound up as mayor stemming from the Moscone–Milk assassinations.

California has jungle primaries so winning the primary isn't enough. In 2018, this meant that the main election was between two Democrats--Feinstein (54.2%) and de León(45.8%). This was actually a pretty solid result given that Feinstein is a strongly entrenched, party supported incumbent. And it was actually the closest election since her first.

And 2018 was just the start of the progressive wing of the Democratic party getting started (that was the year that AOC got elected and surprised everybody), so a highly liberal challenger simply wasn't in the cards, yet.

She will have a much tougher road in 2024, but I will be highly surprised if she even runs.

[tagoregrtst]

Good point about CA’s primaries, I forgot about that quirk. But that only makes her permanence worse. By 2024 she might not be alive or too tiered, she’s not young, but she’s not in danger. Shes been senator since 1992!

My SV comment is not that the proles (that includes tech workers) in San Fran care for her, but tech power in SV is allied with her from a decades long symbiotic relationship.

[shostack]

Really? You can't think of _any_ others who have done much worse things to our country?

[tagoregrtst]

Well theres only 100 of them. For what I care for she’s always on the other side.

The only time I agreed with her was her torture work, but that revealed her hypocrisy.

So, on the whole, I disagree with her and I believe her to be a massive hypocrite.

[colinmhayes]

> Feinstein is the senator I dislike the most

You don't mind the senators that voted to disenfranchise the millions of voters in Arizona?

[nate_meurer]

This is the kind of comment that I fucking hate the most. You've attacked OP with a stupid, bad-faith presumption that has nothing to do with their simple and straightforward statement.

In case I have to spell it out for you, yes, OP can simultaneously disagree with Feinstein and with multiple other politicians.

[colinmhayes]

> OP can simultaneously disagree with Feinstein and with multiple other politicians.

That's not what they said. They said Feinstein was worse.

[tagoregrtst]

Worse doesn't mean that everyone else is swell.

A < B and A < 0 doesn’t imply B>0. All it implies is that A<B

[nate_meurer]

I see. So in your world, when I say that Trump was the worst president in history, that means that I "don't mind" Bush or Nixon?

Help me understand your logic here.

[tagoregrtst]

It follows from basic math that, if I dislike Feinstein the most, I dislike the other 99 senators less.

However, it doesn't follow from:

“Feinstein is the senator I dislike the most”

That I don’t mind the other 99, or any subset thereof.

[takeda]

So far for this type of laws she always have a canned response essentially saying "I know better than you".

Anyway I emailed her, and encourage everyone do so. Not doing anything, by assuming it is pointless is a self fulfilling prophecy.

I wish somebody younger would replace her :(

[chris_va]

Having peeked behind the political shroud on occasion (and still by no means an expert), I think people overestimate the complexity of the US political system.

Most politicians are not imposing some personal beliefs, they are just representing whichever voice their staffers/office hears most often. And, even for a senator, there aren't that many people who actually call to talk to a staffer.

The ones that do usually have a strong interest, so the staffers generally hear a skewed version of reality (and while these folks are often bright, deep domain experts they generally are not).

Sooo... Calling/writing does quite a bit more than you might think, if you can get even a reasonable number of people to do it who the staffers believe actually have expertise and are within the district/state.

The staffers will probably give a mostly generic response, but these are all tallied up internally and definitely drive policy.

[icelancer]

Small business owners banded together to lobby WA state offices, regional offices, etc in the form of letters, calls, emails, and social media, and what that amounted to was having the 2nd most harsh lockdowns / business closures with zero financial compensation from the state.

Gov. Inslee and the Democrats below him had absolutely zero desire to engage in discussing concepts about how to safely keep small businesses open, even when we noted everything Gov. Polis (D-CO) was doing to try and balance things out.

All Inslee cared about was driving one number (COVID cases) down as much as possible to the exclusion of everything else. No amount of lobbying mattered.

If it drove any sort of policy... it had a backwards effect at best. All while huge corporations in our state like Microsoft and Amazon generated record revenues and drove their stock prices up.

[icelancer]

I write to all my Democrat reps (I live in a solidly blue state) and get shit all nothing in response to positions that go against the mainstream leftist positions. I still do it because... eh, why not, but I know it has zero value. It's sad.