According to a new report, longtime Senator Dianne Feinstein is displaying unmistakable signs of cognitive decline, leaving her colleagues in Congress scurrying for methods to persuade her to step down before her tenure ends in 2024.
“It’s bad, and it’s getting worse,” one Democratic senator told the San Francisco Chronicle, which also noted that a member of California’s congressional delegation who has known Feinstein (D-Calif.) for 15 years had to reintroduce himself to her many times during a lengthy discussion.
“I have worked with her for a long time and long enough to know what she was like just a few years ago: always in command, always in charge, on top of details, basically couldn’t resist a conversation where she was driving some bill or some idea,” the lawmaker said. “All of that is gone. She was an intellectual and political force not that long ago, and that’s why my encounter with her was so jarring. Because there was just no trace of that.”
The 88-year-old senator’s memory is fast declining, according to the Chronicle article, which cited four of Feinstein’s Senate colleagues and three former workers, as well as the House member.
Feinstein, a former mayor of San Francisco who was first elected to the Senate in 1992, has been one of the chamber’s most powerful and prominent members for the past three decades, chairing the Senate Intelligence Committee for six years and serving as a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Trump administration.
