Watching Sen. Dianne Feinstein explain her vote to confirm Michael Mukasey as attorney general made me wonder whether she was feeling pretty lonely these days.

Feinstein was one of only six Democrats to confirm the former federal judge. Her support and that of New York Sen. Charles Schumer was key to the Bush nominee being confirmed. Without at least one of their votes, his nomination would have never gotten out of the Judiciary Committee and sent to the floor.

California’s senior senator had to cross the aisle Thursday night to even be able to speak on the matter. Let me explain.

When a senator wants to speak on the floor, he or she has to get an allotment of time from whoever is the so-called manager of whatever is being debated. On the Mukasey nomination, Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, and the panel’s ranking member, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania, were doling out the time during the five-hour debate.

But Feinstein and Schumer, the two Democrats who spoke in favor of Mukasey, got their time from Specter, not fellow Democrat Leahy.

Beyond that, I’m not sure she loved all the praise Specter showered on her before her floor speech. Specter pointed to her courage in bucking her party. It was probably well-meaning but likely just served to pour salt in the wound among most of the rest of the Democrats.

But the senator didn’t seem fazed at all when I talked to her Friday afternoon after she got home to San Francisco.

“I have never believed people elected me to represent this big state just to be a rubber stamp,” Feinstein said. “I’m there to stand up for what I believe is right.”

She said, believe it or not, that she didn’t get grief from her colleagues about her decision. At a Democratic caucus meeting, Majority Leader Harry Reid told colleagues that while he was going to vote no on Mukasey, he wasn’t going to pressure anyone else on how to vote.

Had Reid really wanted to play hardball, he could have put a filibuster in place, and Mukasey wouldn’t have been confirmed because that would have required 60 votes. The vote to confirm him was 53-40.

Democrats who spoke out said they were voting no mostly because of Mukasey’s answers on the issue of waterboarding. They were outraged that he wouldn’t clearly say that waterboarding – a technique that simulates drowning – was torture and couldn’t be tolerated.

Feinstein made it clear she believes waterboarding is wrong. But she took a practical tack, something that I’ve seen a lot in her judgments over the years.

Feinstein’s basic point was if you don’t like Mukasey, think about who will be running the Justice Department if he isn’t confirmed.

President Bush made it clear that if the Senate snubbed Mukasey he wouldn’t send up another nominee. That would have meant that for the next 14 months, the Justice Department would have an acting attorney general who had not been vetted at all by the Senate. And all the senior positions at the department that are now vacant would likely be filled by people Bush could put in place with so-called recess appointments. A president can appoint anyone he wants to a job when Congress is not in session. And lawmakers can’t do anything about it for the duration of the congressional session. Bush would be out of office before this Congress could boot a recess appointment he makes now.

So Feinstein’s rationale was that Mukasey may not have answered the torture question the way she’d like but there was no question he would be an improvement over former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or an acting AG.

The state’s other senator, Barbara Boxer, voted no on Mukasey, agreeing with most of her colleagues that Mukasey’s answers on torture and on executive power were unacceptable.

Feinstein told me she believes the lack of credibility the Bush administration has built up over the years influenced many of her Democratic colleagues on this nomination.

But, she said, she also believes when it comes to Cabinet appointments the president deserves some deference. And she said that the waterboarding issue was one out of hundreds of questions Mukasey answered during the confirmation process.

Anyone who has followed Feinstein’s career knows that this vote was not an aberration.

In fact, it comes just weeks after she really upset many of her colleagues and civil rights activists by being the only Democrat on the Judiciary Committee to vote in favor of Leslie Southwick to become a federal appeals court judge. Her vote allowed him to come to the floor where he was approved 59-38.

Southwick was opposed in part because of two opinions he concurred in as a lower court judge. One was a 1998 decision that upheld the reinstatement of a social worker who used a racial slur about a co-worker. Another was a ruling against a bisexual mother in a custody case. Feinstein said those two incidents shouldn’t define an otherwise good career.

And remember the vote to approve the Medicare prescription drug program in 2003? Feinstein voted yes. The vote to approve the bill was 54-44, with 35 Democrats, including Boxer, voting no. Feinstein again took the practical road, saying the bill to provide some drug coverage was better than no bill at all.

So far, Feinstein hasn’t paid any political price for such votes.

Feinstein pointed out on the floor Thursday night that the vast majority of editorial boards in California praised her decision to vote for Mukasey. Republicans couldn’t even muster an opponent against her re-election last year. And she won’t be up for re-election again until 2012. So I don’t believe we’ll see much of a change in way she makes up her mind on votes in the future.

We’ll be watching.

Bunis is the Register’s Washington bureau chief

Contact the writer: 202-628-6381 or dbunis@ocregister.com