Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is pushing back on lawmakers’ accounts that her memory has deteriorated and she is mentally unfit to serve, insisting that she remains a productive senator at the age of 88.
“The real question is whether I’m still an effective representative for 40 million Californians, and the record shows that I am,” she said in a statement Thursday.
Feinstein, who is the oldest U.S. senator, took the step of responding to a San Francisco Chronicle report that four Senate colleagues — three of them Democrats — and three of the lawmaker’s former staffers and a California Democrat in the House said her memory is rapidly deteriorating. Various individuals said the lawmaker’s staff does most of the work because of what they described as her cognitive decline.