Rep. Tom Lantos Dies

AP/SacBee has the unfortunate news:

Rep. Tom Lantos of California, the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress, has died, his spokeswoman said Monday.

Lynne Weil said that Lantos, 80, passed away at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in suburban Maryland.

Lantos was the only Holocaust survivor in Congress and had a long record on human rights issues.

Lantos, who was elected to the House in 1980, founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 1983. In early 2004 he led the first congressional delegation to Libya in more than 30 years, meeting personally with Moammar Gadhafi and urging the Bush administration to show “good faith” to the North African leader in his pledge to abandon his nuclear weapons programs. Later that year, President Bush lifted sanctions against Libya.

Lantos had already announced his retirement because of the cancer.  He becomes the second California member of Congress to succumb to cancer in this session after Juanita Millender-McDonald who passed away in April.

Tom Lantos was a giant and will be missed both as a legislator and a person.