Barbara Boxer's Greatest Hits

Barbara Boxer, the junior senator from California, announced Thursday she will not seek re-election.  Her current term, which is her fourth in the upper chamber of Congress, will expire in January 2017.  Here are some reasons why I have considered Boxer to be the least disappointing Democrat in the Senate ever since Russell Feingold of Wisconsin left that body in 2011.

Boxer (US Senate
Historical Office)

Four years after no senator joined 13 representatives in their objections to the illegitimate Electoral votes from Florida, Boxer partnered with the late Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio to challenge the illegitimate Electoral votes from Ohio, forcing Congress to debate and vote on whether to certify them.  Boxer was the lone senator to join the mere 31 representatives who opposed certification.

At the hearings on the nomination of Condoleezza Rice PhD to be secretary of State -- a nomination Boxer was one of just 12 Democrats to vote to reject -- Boxer grilled Rice on lies she told as George W. Bush's wife national security advisor, especially about the invasion and occupation of Iraq -- an operation of which Boxer was among only 21 Democratic senators to vote against authorization.

Boxer was one of merely three cosponsors of Feingold's proposal to censure Bush for his misconduct with regard to surveillance by the National Security Agency. 

Chairing the Committee on the Environment and Public Works, Boxer deflated her colleague James Inhofe of Oklahoma for trying, at a hearing on climate change, to prevent any of his time from being used by former vice president Albert Gore Jr. to answer questions the denier of climate change was asking him.

Lastly, I fondly recall Boxer's fine job at comedy in the episode of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm entitled, "The Anonymous Donor."