re: #264 jamesfirecat

Could you tell me what those things are, or give me a link to the article?

You’ll likely need a subscription, but here goes:

A Chance at Boxer by Jay Nordlinger

Excerpt:

She is possibly the leftmost member of the Senate, Boxer is. And she is maybe the most partisan in style. (It’s been 15 years since Howard Metzenbaum served.) Boxer can be strident, shrill, and other things you must never call a woman. She is quite unlike the other senator from California, Dianne Feinstein. DiFi’s a liberal Democrat, all right: but she occasionally departs from liberal orthodoxy, and you can work with her. Boxer does not mingle much with Republicans. And, ideologically, she’s true-blue, or true-something. Boxer has a good deal in common with Speaker Nancy Pelosi: Both women grew up in the East, Boxer in Brooklyn, Pelosi in Baltimore; and both went west to San Francisco, to become scrappy heroines of the Left.

Boxer was born in 1940, and made it to the Marin County Board of Supervisors in 1976. Six years later, she made it to the U.S. House. While there, she was known for her fierce opposition to the Gulf War, and for her perhaps fiercer opposition to Clarence Thomas. As a House member, she could not vote on that Supreme Court nominee: but she marched, literally, in favor of his accuser, Anita Hill. “Believe the woman” was an article of Democratic faith in those days; with the rise of Bill Clinton, that would go out the window.

In 1992, Boxer ran for the Senate, beating two other experienced Democrats in a primary. She then beat Bruce Herschensohn in the general: when it was revealed, at the last minute, that he had been to a strip club (with his girlfriend and another couple). Who knew that the California electorate was so square? Several other women were elected to the Senate at the same time, which is why 1992 was dubbed “the Year of the Woman.” Boxer has had two races since, both of them relative cakewalks for her.

How left-wing has she been in the Senate? Consider a single fact: She was the only senator to vote against accepting the Ohio results in the 2004 presidential election, Bush versus Kerry. Conspiracy types claimed that the Republicans had rigged things in Ohio; Boxer wanted a debate. Mainly, she has been known for her staunch, total support of abortion, and that includes partial-birth abortion, of course. In one infamous, creepy exchange with Sen. Rick Santorum in 1999, she had trouble saying that a baby had a right to life even if it made it out of its mother’s womb.