As California’s senior Senator, Dianne Feinstein has built a reputation as an independent voice, working hard to find commonsense solutions to problems facing California and the nation.
Since her election to the Senate in 1992, Senator Feinstein has built a significant record of legislative achievements across a wide range of issues.
Senator Feinstein led a bipartisan group of senators in passing legislation to drastically increase the fuel efficiency of cars. She was a leading voice in the effort to legalize gay marriage and ensure rights for LGBT Americans. She’s a champion for the preservation of the Mojave Desert, Lake Tahoe and California’s forests. She helped create the nationwide AMBER Alert network, passed bills to criminalize border drug tunnels and has long focused on improving California’s water infrastructure and reducing the threat of wildfires. She also continues to advocate for commonsense gun laws.
The economy has improved significantly from the depths of the Great Recession, but Senator Feinstein agrees that too many workers are struggling to find good-paying jobs and too many families are having trouble making ends meet. She supports investments to help create more jobs and comprehensive tax reform to incentivize growth and reduce the deficit.
Jobs
Senator Feinstein believes Congress must do more to help create jobs that pay livable wages. She supports making critical investments to help create jobs and prepare workers for the 21st century economy, including offering incentives to businesses to hire new workers, providing funding for job-training programs, investing in infrastructure and making higher education more affordable. She is also a cosponsor of the Raise the Wage Act, which would gradually raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, following California’s lead.
Fiscal Issues
Senator Feinstein believes more must be done to balance the federal budget – one reason she voted against the 2017 Republican tax law, which added nearly $1.5 trillion to the national debt over 10 years. She supports a balanced approach to reducing the deficit that combines revenue-raising measures, such as closing tax loopholes, with spending reforms, including efforts to further slow the growth of health care costs by negotiating drug prices.
Taxes
Senator Feinstein believes that Congress had an opportunity in 2017 to enact comprehensive tax reform that would help create jobs, encourage entrepreneurship and reduce the deficit. Unfortunately, the tax law passed by Republicans provided a windfall for corporations and the wealthiest Americans, while eliminating important deductions for middle-class families and increasing the deficit by nearly $1.5 trillion over 10 years.
Senator Feinstein voted against the 2017 tax law and supports revisiting changes to the tax code that harm hard-working Californians, including the new cap on state and local tax deductions. She is a cosponsor of the Stop the Attack on Local Taxpayers Act, which would repeal the cap to ensure that California families are not taxed twice on the same income.