Bob Filner, a fiery liberal with a short fuse who served in the House for nearly two decades, died on April 20 at the age of 82.
Filner left Congress in 2012 to become mayor of San Diego, only to leave that post within a year amid allegations of sexual harassment. He was known equally in the halls of Congress for his volatility as he was for his advocacy for veterans.
He saw himself as the guardian of both veterans and the employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and he served as the top Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee for five years. Filner held the committee gavel from 2007 until Republicans took the majority in 2011.
When then-Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio proposed some cuts in the fiscal 2011 spending bill funding VA programs, Filner pounced.
“Going into an election, you want to be against veterans?” asked Filner. “This shows what they [Republicans] really mean when they say ‘support the troops.’ They don’t support them once they come home.”
In the House, he fought to bolster mental and physical health care for veterans. He authored legislation allowing Congress to write VA appropriations for health programs two years in advance to avoid the kind of shortfalls that had plagued the department in past years.
A former civil rights activist who by his own account avoided the draft with repeated student deferments, Filner landed on the Veterans’ Affairs Committee almost by accident.
Soon after his first election in 1992, he ran into Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston of California, who was heading into retirement. Cranston, who had chaired the veterans’ committee in the Senate, urged Filner to seek the House assignment, telling him it was good politics for a liberal to champion the cause of veterans. Filner took the advice.
The California Democrat was especially focused on Filipino veterans’ concerns, inspired by the large Filipino community in his San Diego-area district. He was arrested while protesting with Filipino American veterans in 1997, chaining themselves to the White House fence when demanding benefit payments for Filipino veterans.
His temper often drew as much attention as his advocacy for veterans. Filner made headlines in 2007 when he got into an altercation with an airline employee who claimed he screamed and pushed past her to find his luggage at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C. Local authorities eventually reduced assault and battery charges to trespassing and levied a $100 fine.
That same year, he launched a profanity-laced tirade outside the Veterans Affairs Department headquarters over the VA’s failure to protect veterans’ personal data from computer theft and other potential threats.
Filner saw his political persona as an advantage.
“People don’t change unless there’s tension,” he told the Voice of San Diego in 2012. “Status quo. Nobody thinks about anything, right, if you don’t create the tension. But if you don’t do it creatively, then they hit you or they shoot you. You gotta make them think about it.”
The one-time aide and liberal disciple of the late Minnesota senator and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey was one of the earliest members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Filner began and ended his political career in San Diego. Before he was elected to Congress in 1992, he served on the school board and the city council.
He left his safe House seat in the middle of his 10th term after being elected San Diego mayor, the first Democrat to take the office in more than two decades. But he held onto the post for less than a year before resigning in August 2013 in the wake of several sexual misconduct allegations.
Filner left emphatically denying any inappropriate actions.
A few months later, he pleaded guilty to false imprisonment and battery charges in state court. His plea agreement with then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris put him on probation for three years.
Born in Pittsburgh, Filner was the son of a former union organizer and businessman. His father was active in the civil rights movement and fundraised for Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom Filner met as a teenager.
When he was a student at Cornell University, Filner joined the Freedom Riders in 1961. He was arrested during a sit-in at a Mississippi lunch counter with the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who later became his House colleague.
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