Mazie Hirono: “over the next days and weeks and months, we are going to hear a lot about our dear friend Dianne Feinstein, and I am so…”

“over the next days and weeks and months, we are going to hear a lot about our dear friend Dianne Feinstein, and I am so glad that some of her friends from California and the Speaker-- former Speaker--Nancy Pelosi and her family are here to just be with us in these first moments of our learning of her passing. And we all have stories to tell about Dianne, but when I joined, for example, the Intel Committee, and she was chairing it, she said: Mazie, this is not a committee that you can just parachute in and not spend the time really learning about our intelligence community and all that--and I really took that to heart. I spent many, many hours on that committee, even though we could never talk about it. And then at one of the earlier hearings of the Judiciary Committee--and I really marveled at this. It was a hearing that had to do with guns, and I always associate, of course, Dianne with her courageous fight to ban assault weapons. And one of the newer members of the Judiciary Committee, as I was, chose that hearing to lecture Dianne Feinstein about her efficacy on guns, and I thought this was so untoward against someone who had spent so much of her time fighting for gun safety. But she just said: I have not spent all these years on this committee to be lectured by you, which I thought was really quite tactful. But later she said to me--she took me aside, and she said: Do you think I was too mean? Do you think I should apologize?…”