Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, a trailblazer for women in American politics and with a career spanning more than 30 years, has died at the age of 90, reports BBC News and Reuters.
Dianne FeinsteinPhoto: MediaPunch / BACKGRID / Backgrid USA / Profimedia
Dianne Feinstein was the senior dean of the US Senate and voted for the last time in the upper house of the US Congress on Thursday.
Confused interviews and memory problems
This elected representative from California has suffered, in recent months, from memory loss and cognitive problems.
In April, she was hospitalized after a “light fall” at home, the latest in a series of health problems.
The former mayor of San Francisco announced that she intended to step down at the end of next year, after growing calls to resign.
After this announcement, President Joe Biden welcomed “a passionate defender of civil liberties” and a “strong voice of national security policies that ensure our safety and honor our values”, according to News.ro.
“I’ve been a colleague of more senators than anyone else,” Biden declared. “I can honestly say that Dianne Feinstein is one of the best.”
Dianne Feinstein was absent from the Capitol for nearly three months this year after contracting shingles.
She assumed lighter duties and moved around the capitol with a wheelchair.
She appeared confused in some interviews, in committee hearings and at the vote.
Dianne Feinstein and gun control
Dianne Feinstein was a fierce advocate for gun control and vocally supported a law banning assault weapons that was signed into law by former Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1994 but expired in 2004.
Feinstein led a new push for tougher gun laws, including a new ban on assault weapons after an attack that killed 20 children and six adults in 2012 at an elementary school in Connecticut.
She also documented the CIA’s torture of terror suspects.
Feinstein was a trailblazer in Washington, becoming, among the rest, the first woman to chair the influential Senate Intelligence Committee.
In her nearly 31 years in the Senate, her politics have been moderate to liberal, sometimes drawing scorn from the left. Feinstein joined the Senate in 1992 and has been re-elected five times, including in 2018, becoming the longest-serving female senator of all time.
Feinstein’s political career has been shaped by guns.
She became mayor of San Francisco in 1978 after the assassination of Mayor George Moscone and San Francisco Board of Supervisors Harvey Milk.
Feinstein was chairman of the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors when Moscone and Milk were shot by former member Dan White. After hearing the gunshots, he rushed to Milk’s office. While checking for a pulse, her finger found a bullet hole.
Feinstein said the horror of that experience never left her.
“This is a gun-happy nation, and everybody can have their own gun,” Feinstein said after a May 2021 mass shooting in her home state, while lamenting Congress’s failure to pass new gun control laws to guard against the ‘killing of the innocent’.”
