It’s a sad day for American politics: Sen. Dianne Feinstein has passed away at 90, after a trailblazing career.
The San Francisco native was the first woman to serve as president of the city’s powerful Board of Supervisors and the first to serve as its mayor — both offices won at a precociously young age in an era when high political opportunities for women were hugely limited.
Coming into the mayor’s office on the heels of the 1978 assassination of George Moscone, she served for a decade and survived a recall effort.
This in a city whose knifefight municipal politics can make Gotham’s look like a walk in the park.
That endurance prefigured her three-decade run as a senator, one which saw significant legislative accomplishments, including the landmark federal assault weapons ban.
She stayed in the game until the literal end, voting as the oldest serving senator the day before she died.
Whether she should have been voting is another question entirely — one around which her fellow Democrats played a self-serving game of denial.
The senator was plagued with health issues in recent years, leaving her weak, confused and clearly unable to do her job.
She signed over financial power of attorney to a daughter; cameras caught an aide on the Senate floor telling her which way to vote.
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Yet her party colleagues demanded she stay in office, to allow California Gov. Gavin Newsom to dodge the divisive-among-Democrats choice of her successor.
In so doing, they damaged our democracy.
That requires informed, aware and fully competent legislators just as much as it does engaged voters.
But Sen. Feinstein’s career should be remembered as a long and honorable one that far outshines the ugly cloud that darkened her last days in the Senate.
