After years of declining health, exacerbated by a bout with shingles in February, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein died on Thursday night at her home in Washington, D.C. Her death was announced on Friday morning.
Feinstein was first elected to the Senate in 1992 and was California’s longest serving senator. Prior to her Senate career, Feinstein served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors throughout the 1970s. According to the Associated Press, she “became its first female president in 1978, the year Mayor George Moscone was gunned down alongside Supervisor Harvey Milk at City Hall by Dan White, a disgruntled former supervisor. Feinstein found Milk’s body.”
She also served as the mayor of San Francisco from 1978 to 1988.
The oldest sitting U.S. senator, Feinstein’s cognitive decline had been an open secret in Washington for years leading to growing calls for her resignation. Those calls grew more insistent during her nearly three month absence from Capitol Hill earlier this year.
Upon her return to the Senate in May, people were shocked by Feinstein’s frailty. Describing the senator’s condition at the time, The New York Times wrote:
Using a wheelchair, with the left side of her face frozen and one eye nearly shut, she seemed disoriented as an aide steered her through the marble corridors of the Senate, complaining audibly that something was stuck in her eye.
Ms. Feinstein’s frail appearance was a result of several complications after she was hospitalized for shingles in February, some of which she has not publicly disclosed. The shingles spread to her face and neck, causing vision and balance impairments and facial paralysis known as Ramsay Hunt syndrome. The virus also brought on a previously unreported case of encephalitis, a rare but potentially debilitating complication of shingles that a spokesman confirmed on Thursday after The New York Times first revealed it, saying that the condition had “resolved itself” in March.
In February, Feinstein’s office announced that she would retire in January 2025, when her current term ended. At a subsequent press conference, the senator was asked by a reporter if she had “any message for her Senate colleagues” in the wake of the announcement.
Feinstein had no idea what he was referring to. After he clarified he was asking about her “decision to not run for reelection,” she said, “Well, I haven’t made that decision. I haven’t released anything.”
A staffer reminded her that they had “put out your statement.” She said, “You put out the statement? I should have known they put it out.”
Even prior to Feinstein’s announcement that she would not seek reelection in 2024, candidates were lining up to take her place. In January, Reps. Katie Porter and Adam Schiff announced their intentions to run for her seat, followed by Rep. Barbara Lee in February.
Now that Feinstein has died, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is tasked with naming a temporary replacement. The Messenger reports that “[w]hoever Newsom appoints will have to run in the statewide primary on March 5, 2024, meaning that voters will have to vote on this Senate seat four times: in the special primary, the general election primary, and then the special and general election.”
In 2020, Newsom came under heavy criticism for replacing then-Sen. Kamala Harris with then-California Secretary of State Alex Padilla. He answered critics by promising to appoint a black woman the next time around.
Discussing the news of Feinstein’s death with Mike earlier today, he suggested a novel idea, one I hadn’t considered: Newsom should appoint himself to the post. The idea sounded radical at first, but it actually makes perfect sense. Such a move would give him a leg up for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. It would also give him some distance from the mess he’s made of California.
Of course, that choice could also take him out of consideration as a potential replacement for Biden in 2024, should he be forced out of the race, for one reason or another.
In the meantime, Feinstein’s death narrows the already slim Democratic majority in the upper chamber to 50 seats and leaves an immediate opening on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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Dying in office at 50 or 60 is one thing but dying in office at 90 because you’ve got no other meaning in life besides your job is just pathetic.
Sadly, that’s what she’ll be remembered for. The decrepit old lady who needed to be wheeled around Capitol Hill and told how to vote.