As California’s newest senator, Democrat Adam Schiff says he’s not going to shy away from familiar territory — opposing Donald Trump when he feels it is necessary
Democrat Adam Schiff stood on the Senate floor almost five years ago as a House impeachment manager and made a passionate case that Donald Trump should be removed from office for abusing the power of the presidency. “If right doesn’t matter, we’re lost,” he told the senators, his voice cracking at one point.
The Republican-led Senate wasn’t convinced, and senators voted to acquit Trump on the Democratic-led impeachment charges over his dealings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump would survive a second impeachment a year later after his supporters stormed the Capitol and tried to overturn his defeat.
Now Trump is headed back to the White House, politically stronger than ever and with a firm hold over what will be a unified Republican Congress. And Schiff, one of Trump’s biggest foils, will be sworn into the Senate on Monday as part of a Democratic caucus that is headed into the minority and has been so far restrained in opposing the returning president, taking more of a wait-and-see approach in the weeks before he is sworn into office.
As California’s newest senator, Schiff says he’s not going to shy away from familiar territory — opposing Trump when he feels it necessary. But he’s also hoping to be known for bipartisanship, as well, after campaigning in Republican areas of his state and working to learn more about rural issues that weren’t in his portfolio in his urban Los Angeles House district.
“I think being there and letting folks get to know me, kick the tires a bit, helps overcome some of the sort of Fox News stereotypes,” Schiff said of the conservative news channel’s focus on him as he challenged Trump in his first term. He says he also sees that outreach as a way to gain insight into Democrats’ way forward after losses in the November elections.
Schiff will be sworn in weeks before the new Congress convenes on Jan. 3 because he is filling the seat of longtime Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who died last year.
