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House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) died Monday due to complications associated with esophageal cancer. He was 80.
In statements issued Monday by his colleagues on Capitol Hill as well as advocacy groups, Lantos was called “courageous,” “indispensable,” “gracious,” and the “conscience of the Congress.”
His survival of the Holocaust led him to spend his 28 years in Congress as a tireless human rights advocate. Four years after his election in 1980, he founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. He was the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress.
Lantos is the seventh member who has died during the 110th Congress.
“As a teenager, Tom was a member of the anti-Nazi underground when Germany occupied his native Hungary, and then and for the remainder of his life he was an indefatigable advocate for human rights and for basic decency,” said Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.).
“He had seen death and he embraced life,” Rep. Gary Ackerman (D- N.Y.) said.
“Courageous does not begin to describe a man like Tom,” said fellow Californian lawmaker David Dreier (R).
Lantos was praised repeatedly for his love and fierce loyalty to the United States, a theme addressed in his own retirement statement issued on Jan. 2 after receiving his diagnosis.
“It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family, and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a member of Congress,” he said.
Born in Hungary, he was among a small group of lawmakers to visit Libya, the first visit to that country by members of Congress since the 1960s, according to the Almanac of American Politics.
In recent years he worked to secure funding for people displaced by the fighting in Sudan.
President Bush noted his commitment to end the suffering of people around the world in his statement: “I also appreciate his efforts to protect our environment, alleviate the sufferings caused by HIV/AIDS, and strengthen our friendships and alliances around the globe.”
Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance, said, “He was crucial to ensuring that the Congress authorized the spending needed to succeed on AIDS, including to help orphaned and vulnerable children.”
Lantos was a close confidant to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who in a statement described his death as “a terrible loss for me personally.”
Lantos’s wife Annette Lantos, his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were with him when he died, his office said in a release.
A special election to replace Lantos will likely be held in June but could be as late as July 1. California election law states that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) shall declare within 14 days of the vacancy a special election date. The special election will be set for about four months later, with a special primary eight weeks before the special election.
Democrats have carried the seat since Lantos defeated the Republican incumbent nearly 28 years ago. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) received 72 percent of the vote in the district in 2004.
Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) would be in line to succeed Lantos as chairman on Foreign Affairs.
Aaron Blake contributed to this report.
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