Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., returned to the Senate this month after an extended period of time away as she reportedly recovered from shingles. But the American public is more concerned about whether the 89-year-old, who’s the oldest member of the Senate, has lost the cognitive ability she needs to do to represent her state. Jim Newell of Slate reported that when another reporter asked Feinstein about her long absence, she responded, “No, I haven’t been gone. You should follow the — I haven’t been gone. I’ve been working.”
Conservatives are making dishonest comparisons between Feinstein and Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who had a stroke during his 2022 campaign for the position.
At the same time, conservatives are making dishonest comparisons between Feinstein and 53-year-old Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who had a stroke during his 2022 campaign for the position and took time away this year to undergo treatment for depression. Fetterman has used closed-captioning to understand what people are saying. Occasionally, he stumbles over words or mushes words together. He said the ridicule he got after his debate performance with Republican Mehmet Oz contributed to his depression.
Drew Holden in The Washington Free Beacon said the press was being hypocritical by intensely covering Feinstein’s decline but not calling into question Fetterman’s ability to do the job. Donald Trump Jr. has called him a “vegetable.” In the National Review, Noah Rothman, who has written columns for MSNBC, compared Fetterman’s stumbles as he recently questioned a Silicon Valley Bank CEO to Feinstein’s memory lapses and pointed out how Democrats mocked the nonsensical ramblings of Herschel Walker, the former football player and Republican who ran a failed campaign to represent Georgia in the Senate.
Conservatives likening Fetterman to Feinstein are making it clear that they fundamentally misunderstand what disability and accommodations mean, which is unsurprising given conservatism’s increasing hostility toward people with disabilities. The two situations are not comparable. Evidence suggests Feinstein is unable to do the essential functions of her job, while Fetterman has shown he is able to do the job if given the proper accommodations.
While it is true Fetterman left the Senate for an extended period of time, he did so to recover from a condition that affects millions of people who, once they go through the proper treatment, can live fulfilling lives (I say this as one of the 17.3 million Americans with depression). Conversely, for years, stories have abounded about Feinstein’s deteriorating memory, such as when she repeated a question to then-Twitter executive Jack Dorsey in 2020. In February, after she was asked about the announcement from her office that she would not seek re-election, she told reporters: “If I haven’t made that decision, I haven’t released anything.” Then her staffer explained to her that a statement from her had been released. For years, Democrats have privately fretted about her notable lapses in memory.
Evidence suggests Feinstein is unable to do the essential functions of her job, while Fetterman has shown he is able to do the job if given the proper accommodations.
Rebecca Cokley, the head of the National Council on Disability during the Obama administration, said that some people, including some people with disabilities, think that talking about accommodations automatically means there should be a blanket excuse for everyone with any type of disability regardless of whether they can fulfill the essential functions of the job. On the contrary, she notes that the greatness of the Americans with Disabilities Act is how individualized it is, and disability law recognizes that.
“Somebody … might be able to do that job, to work the hours of that job, to read and mark up the legislation, to manage the staff, like all of the things that go into being a representative, somebody might be able to do it in their 80s,” Cokley said. “And the person in the office next to them might not be able to do it in their 80s, and that’s OK.”
The ADA gives us a way to measure whether someone’s disability or illness prevents them from doing the job: The law defines “essential functions” as the basic duties an employee must be able to fulfill with or without reasonable accommodations.
In order for conservatives to acknowledge the distinctions between Feinstein and Fetterman, they might first have to acknowledge the validity of the ADA and disability rights. However, they have become outright hostile to the ADA in the three decades since Republicans including George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole and John McCain supported it. Acknowledging that Fetterman’s issues aren’t on par with Feinstein’s would also require them to admit that they’ve been acting in bad faith. Fetterman may have slurred his words when he grilled Silicon Valley Bank’s executive, but the gist and the thrust of his argument could still be understood, as was the case when he spoke with other senators about invoking the 14th Amendment to end the standoff with Republicans over the debt limit. He’s also led the charge in opposing Republicans’ demand that work requirements be added to programs including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as food stamps. Fetterman may have slurred his words, but the gist and the thrust of his argument could still be understood. Matthew Cortland, a disability rights advocate and former recipient of SNAP who works for Data for Progress, told me that he has interacted with Fetterman and is confident in his capacity to do the job. “Senator Fetterman with reasonable accommodations around communication, the speech-to-text-technology that he’s using, is fully able to make a full-throated defense of SNAP on behalf of Pennsylvanians in Americans everywhere,” they told me. At the same time, if Feinstein cannot remember that she was out of commission for so long, that would suggest she can no longer carry out the necessary requirements for her job. That would mean she should gracefully retire after a long, notable career of service.
Eric Garcia is an author and senior correspondent for The Independent. 
