I won’t dance on her grave here, but the reality is she was a rapidly anti-gun D.C. insider, from extremist California stock, who was one of the poster children for term/age limits on elected officials.
She was also the longest serving woman in the US Senate, California’s longest serving senator with serving since 1992, and the Mayor of San Francisco seated in 1978 where she took the office after an assassination carried out by another politician killed the Mayor and the Supervisor.
Those are not meager accomplishments. I fundamentally disagreed with this woman on many issues. Her support of gun control and the Patriot Act being high among them. But she did accomplish some great things. Terrible things, yes, stupid, ignorant, willfully blind even, but great.
How kindly history will look on her legacy will depend both personally on your perspectives and on where the social norms of the country settle. It isn’t looking great for extremists on political ends right now as the bases sour of their shenanigans slowly more and more. Feinstein is arguably one of those history may take a dim view of in the end for many reasons, but not for everything. From my perspective, keeping this woman in office for her final decade was elder abuse in the form of legacy building and petty politics.
