Sen. Dianne Feinstein dies at age 90

Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who was the oldest sitting U.S. senator, has died. She was 90 years old.

Feinstein built a career of political milestones as the first female mayor of San Francisco and the first female senator from California.

Tragedy propelled Feinstein’s political rise. In 1978, Dan White, a colleague on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Forty years later on CNN, Feinstein recalled the moment: “I heard the shots, I smelled the cordite.” When she found Milk’s body, she said, “I put my finger in a bullet hole trying to get a pulse.” As president of the Board of Supervisors, it fell to Feinstein to announce the news. She then succeeded Moscone as mayor.

Over her long Senate career, which began in 1992, Feinstein was a dependable liberal on social issues. Her pro-abortion voting record earned a zero percent rating from the National Right to Life Committee. She also shepherded the 1994 gun control law known as the Federal Assault Weapons Ban and wrote a blistering report on the CIA’s use of torture, taking on the national security establishment.

Feinstein descended from Russian and Polish immigrants. Her father was a Jewish surgeon and her mother, a model, had Jewish and Catholic connections. Feinstein identified as Jewish but graduated from Convent of the Sacred Heart High School, where she said she learned discipline.

Though she described herself in one interview as “religious in her thinking,” Feinstein received pushback from Christians when she appeared to apply a “religion test” to Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett during Senate confirmation hearings with the words, “the dogma lives loudly within you.” At the conclusion of those hearings, she complimented committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on “one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in.”

Her health visibly declined in recent years, and she was absent from the Senate for more than two months this past spring while she recovered from a case of shingles. The illness caused paralysis on one side of her face, and she struggled with eyesight and balance. She resisted calls to resign but said she would not run for reelection in 2024.

Feinstein’s third husband, Richard Blum, and a daughter from her first marriage survive her.