Dianne Feinstein

Since her election to the Senate in 1992, Senator Feinstein has built a significant record of legislative achievements across a wide range of issues.

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. 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. She also continues to advocate for commonsense gun laws.

Among her most notable achievements are the enactment of the federal Assault Weapons Ban in 1994, a law that prohibited the sale, manufacture and import of military-style assault weapons that expired in 2014 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 post-9/11 interrogation methods are never used again.

Senator Feinstein authored the first major cybersecurity bill to be signed into law in years. She’s an aggressive opponent of sex trafficking and authored legislation to help prevent sex abuse of amateur athletes. She’s an advocate for consumers, authoring bills to review chemicals in personal care products, ban chemicals in toys, crack down on rogue pharmacies and strengthen food safety.

In 2017, the senator became the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee – the first woman to assume that role – where she helped shape policy on criminal law, national security, immigration, civil rights and the courts. She stepped down from that position in January 2021.