Dianne Feinstein’s Death Raises High-Stakes Questions

California senior Sen. Dianne Feinstein has died at the age of 90. The longest serving female senator in American history, and the Senate’s oldest member, she had planned to retire at the end of 2024.

Feinstein’s reputation has evolved greatly over her 30 years in the senate: She is best known variously for her work on gun control and women’s rights, her commitment to finding common ground with Republicans, and finally, for her long and very public health decline and her refusal to step down. She was also the driving force behind the famed Torture Report, the multiyear investigation into the CIA’s post-9/11 enhanced interrogation practices published in 2014.

In recent years, Feinstein has mostly been known for her deteriorating cognitive health and her opposition to progressives in her own party. She famously dismissed youth activists who crowded her office pushing for her support of the Green New Deal, saying, “You didn’t vote for me,” and publicly hugged and thanked Senate Judiciary chairman Lindsey Graham, a Republican, after he pushed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett through a confirmation hearing just days before the November 2020 election. Democrats also felt that she mishandled critical information in the Brett Kavanaugh hearing two years prior to that. After the Barrett debacle, she stepped down as chairwoman of the Judiciary Committee but did not leave the committee.

Feinstein was absent from the Senate in the spring to deal with complications from a bout of shingles. She returned in bad health, wheelchair-bound and at times, seemingly unaware of her own prolonged absence. Still, many of her defenders in the Democratic Party resisted calls for her to resign.

Already there is a hotly contested race for the seat she will vacate in 2024 in California, which will be made even more complicated by her death. Gov. Gavin Newsom had pledged to appoint a Black woman to the office should Feinstein resign and recently clarified that he would not pick someone from the current pool of contestants in the 2024 primary. That means he’ll be appointing a caretaker for the remaining 14 months of the term, who will then step aside for one of the Democrats now running.

Senate Democrats will hope that is done quickly, because Feinstein’s death creates an absence on the all-important Senate Judiciary Committee that will make it much more difficult to confirm federal judges. Rumors have circulated that Republicans would refuse to allow a Feinstein replacement to be seated on the committee if she were to step down, but it would be exceptionally unprecedented for a minority party to refuse to allow the majority to retain their majority on a committee. With Republicans likely to win back the chamber come 2024, it’s unclear why they would want to set such a precedent.