Dianne Feinstein dead: Longtime California senator was 90

California Senator Dianne Feinstein has died, sources tell Fox News. She was 90. 

The longtime senator had suffered from extensive health issues for more than a year, leading many to wonder about her fitness for office. Her cause of death was unclear as of Friday morning. 

Feinstein was present in the Senate on Wednesday and cast a vote at 11:45 a.m. ET, according to the congressional record. 

However, she missed two votes later in the afternoon. 

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Democratic Majority Whip Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., remembered Feinstein as a friend and colleague of more than two decades.

“She was my friend and my seatmate on the Senate Judiciary Committee for over 20 years. She was always the lady, but she never backed down from a cause that she thought was right. She has written a great record in areas like the assault weapons ban, violence against women and so many other areas. We’ve lost one of the real leaders in the Senate,” Durbin told Fox News. 

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who sat with Feinstein on the Senate Committee on Intelligence, said she was a “political pioneer with a historic career of public service.” 

“Intelligent, hard working [and] always treated everyone with courtesy [and] respect,” Rubio wrote on X. “May God grant her eternal rest.” 

 Feinstein, the longest-serving female senator ever, was first elected to the role in 1992.

“Senator Feinstein led a bipartisan group of senators in passing legislation to drastically increase the fuel efficiency of cars. She was a leading voice in the effort to legalize gay marriage and ensure rights for LGBT Americans,” a biography on her website reads.

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“She’s a champion for the preservation of the Mojave Desert, Lake Tahoe and California’s forests. She helped create the nationwide AMBER Alert network, passed bills to criminalize border drug tunnels and has long focused on improving California’s water infrastructure and reducing the threat of wildfires,” it added, noting that she has pushed for “commonsense gun laws.”

Her biography says her “most notable achievements” are the “enactment of the federal Assault Weapons Ban in 1994” and the “six-year review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program that culminated in the 2014 release of the report’s executive summary and passage of legislation ensuring that certain post-9/11 interrogation methods are never used again.”

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Prior to serving as a senator, Feinstein spent nine years as San Francisco County Supervisor, beginning in 1969. She then became mayor of the city in 1978 and was elected to two four-year terms.

“Senator Feinstein’s career has been one of firsts,” her website biography also says. “She was the first woman president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the first woman mayor of San Francisco, the first woman elected Senator of California, the first woman member and first woman ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the first woman to chair the Senate Rules and Administration Committee and the first woman to chair the Senate Intelligence Committee.”

Feinstein announced in February that she would not seek a sixth term as California’s senior senator in the 2024 general election. A week after that announcement she was absent from the Senate for more than two months as she recovered from a case of shingles. 

Amid the concerns about her health, Feinstein stepped down as the top Democrat on the Judiciary panel after the 2020 elections, just as her party was about to take the majority. In 2023, she said she would not serve as the Senate president pro tempore, or the most senior member of the majority party, even though she was in line to do so. The president pro tempore opens the Senate every day and holds other ceremonial duties.

Fox is told members of her staff have put flowers on Feinstein’s desk on the Senate floor as of Friday morning. 

This is a developing story and will be updated. Fox News’ Aishah Hasnie, Tyler Olson and Anders Hagstrom and the Associated Press contributed to this report.