Legendary Democratic legislator John Dingell, 92, is in hospice care at his Dearborn, Mich. home with a cancer diagnosis, according to press accounts and his wife, Rep. Debbie Dingell, who won his district seat in 2014 after he retired from Congress.
She tweeted on Wednesday after skipping Tuesday’s State of the Union address, “Friends and colleagues know me and know I would be in Washington right now unless something was up. I am home with John and we have entered a new phase. He is my love and we have been a team for nearly 40 years.”
The Detroit News reported that Dingell “was diagnosed a year ago with prostate cancer that had metastasized, and Dingell decided not to treat it, a family member said Wednesday.” His wife told the newspaper he is in relatively good spirits. He irrepressibly Tweeted shortly after his wife’s Tweet, “The Lovely Deborah is insisting I rest and stay off here, but after long negotiations we’ve worked out a deal where she’ll keep up with Twitter for me as I dictate the messages. I want to thank you all for your incredibly kind words and prayers. You’re not done with me just yet.” He has over 250,000 Twitter followers.
John D. Dingell Jr. was the longest serving member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He became a member upon the death of his father, John D. Dingell, also a Michigan Democrat, died in office in 1955.
Dingell was also the most important energy legislator in the 20th century. His 1981 orchestrating of the expansion of the venerable Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee turned the somewhat sleepy panel into the most important legislative venue in the House, with jurisdiction that spans virtually all of the U.S. economy.
In 1991, the New York Times said, “Since he became chairman 10 years ago, Mr. Dingell has brought more and more fields under the umbrella of the Energy and Commerce Committee. He has jurisdiction now over not only energy and transportation but also the environment, health, telecommunications, insurance, the financial markets, consumer protection, broadcasting, food and drugs, biotechnology and countless other issues that are woven into the fabric of American life in the 1990’s.”
In his memoir “The Dean: The Best Seat in the House” Dingell said what he views as the decline of the Congress as an institution helped him reach the decision to leave office. He said Congress has become “a mean-spirited place…devoid of bipartisanship.” Feisty, funny, plain spoken, and often profane, Dingell got along with almost all of the members of the Energy and Commerce Committee over the years, Democrats and Republicans.
— Kennedy Maize