He is terrible on things like ACA and any social welfare program. He is a RW libertarian. However, like his father, he has been very strong against many military actions and torture.
Senators can not all be seen as homogenous representatives of their party. As it is very likely that Rand Paul will not change position on the CIA nominee and McCain is unlikely as well - his statement was strong on torture and he is in any event unlikely to return to DC, the Republicans will not have even 50 votes, if ALL the Democrats vote no.
So, it the nominee is approved, it likely will be with Democratic votes. Feinstein's request speaks to this. She is asking that the records relating to the nominee's actions at the black facility be made public. This actually will start an interesting philisophophical question.
The Bush administration opened black facilities and their lawyers wrote opinions that the practices were not torture. However, many procedures were internationally identified as being torture. Obama closed the facilities, and the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on torture early in administartion. However, there are likely many people working for the military, CIA or other organizations who were asked to do things by their superiors that were against international law.
I would argue that a person qualified to lead the CIA should have have had the strength and the character to refuse a position like that - even if it would destroy their career. This is a high bar on one level. It asks an ambiticious person to risk their future career on doing what is right. On the other hand, NOT be willing to do that means that the person did not think the black facilities were wrong, thought them wrong, but not worth risking their career, or considered it is was more important to "follow orders" than to follow moral values. I can't see any other possibilities -- and all lead me to reject that she should head the CIA. We do not want someone who did not see the black operations as wrong, who considered furthering their career more important than doing something they recognized as wrong or thought that they had no personal responsibility to question what they were asked to do. I get that it would punish someone for doing what she was asked.
In this light, it seems that asking for the records is to clarify exactly what the nominee did. It is worth noting that Congress itself was not informed on the black sites. (It is possible the gang of 8 was but the entire Congress was not. Many learned only when some allies complained publicly. ) This might also be considered related to the fact that no one was ever held accountable for that program. Note that Tom Cotton and others defending what was done as needed for national security. However, as people from John McCain to John Kerry to many generals have said, torture does not produce good information and it does produce a lot of false information when the victim says whatever he thinks will stop the torture.
In the Bush years, we lost the argument. Both Kerry and Dean condemned Abu Ghraib when the stories came out and that story did hurt Bush. However, polling before the election showed that when people were asked who was stronger on national security, although Kerry did better than Democrats usually do, focus groups in places like Ohio (done after the election) showed many people put national security as what they voted on and it was issues like torture and other unethical, immoral actions that made the difference ... for Bush. They said (I would say correctly) that Bush/Cheney would not be constained by morality and Kerry would. That AND they believed that those actions were needed to keep us safer.
They are now relitigating this issue -- and the fear I have is that they are pushing two memes: The first is that Obama put the US at risk and that these immoral actions are needed to keep America safe. (Ignore that it was not the terrorists that were the targets of this who attacked us in Obama's years -- it was Russia's cyber attack.) Both of these are dangerous -- the first adds to the Republicans claiming that they are better on national security and 2004 suggests that they can convince enough terrorized people to throw away their morality for untrue security benefits. I refused to see Zero dark thirty because it covered a real event and credited dark actions when that was not how we got the info. The second is that Trump has already said we should do things worse than waterboarding. Putting someone who did not say no when asked to be part of this in the past is not a good idea. It may be there was more to the nominee's actions than is public that show her in a better light, but if there is nothing that changes what she is seen to have done, this is not good.
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