Carl Levin, a liberal Democrat who rose from a prominent Detroit family to become Michigan’s longest-serving U.S.

The Levin Center at Wayne State University put out a statement late Thursday, saying, "With great sadness and heavy hearts, the (center and family) announce the passing of Senator Carl Levin.".

Andy Levin, D-Bloomfield Twp., put out a statement on his uncle's passing:.

“Throughout my adult life, wherever I went in Michigan, from Copper Harbor to Monroe, I would run into people who would say, ‘I don’t always agree with Senator Levin, but I support him anyway because he is so genuine, he tells it straight and he follows through.’.

As a Michigan senator, he defended the auto industry, supported the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler in 2008-09 and backed numerous projects including Detroit’s RiverWalk, the M-1 Light Rail and the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, among others.

McCain, a war hero, went on to call Levin “a model of serious purpose, firm principle and personal decency” and said that while they often disagreed, Levin never went back on his word.

Announcing in early 2013 that he wouldn’t run for a seventh six-year Senate term, Levin, then age 78, said he wanted to spent what little time he had left in office concentrating on policy matters rather than raising the increasingly huge amounts of cash needed to run a Senate race that — had he chosen to run — he likely would have won.

Born in 1934 in Detroit to Saul and Bess Levin, Carl Levin came from — and would continue to represent — a family of lawyers, many of them engaged in social activism and politics.

Saul Levin would become a Michigan corrections commissioner.

Back in Detroit, Carl worked as an attorney, as general counsel for the Michigan Civil Rights Commission and as Detroit’s chief appellate defender.

Then, in 1968, Carl won a Detroit City Council seat that he held through 1977, serving his last four years on the council as president.

Robert Griffin, a Republican, indicated he’d had enough with Congress and moved to retire, Carl Levin jumped at the chance.

Six years later, astronaut Jack Lousma, a tall, handsome Republican, would try to take the seat back, noting in some of his campaign materials his physical attributes — which were different than, as Levin later told the Washington Post, his own “plump, balding and disheveled look.” Levin embraced his attributes instead of running away from them.

“It worked,” he later said.

It also didn’t hurt Levin in auto-centric Michigan when it was discovered that Lousma drove a Toyota.

Sandy retired in 2019, with his son, Carl’s nephew, Andy Levin, winning the seat and both Carl and Sandy lending support.

history in 2013, Levin was one of the first to rouse the Obama White House, putting together a list of some 200 federal programs through which the city might receive aid while, at the same time, pushing back efforts in the U.S.

Around that time, Levin went before a Christian Science Monitor breakfast and told journalists that while his hometown faced challenges, “Detroit is on its way back.

“If a Senate majority demonstrates it can make such a change once, there are no rules which binds a majority and all future majorities will feel free to exercise the same power,” said Levin.

Then, in 2017, a Republican-led Senate did exactly as Levin predicted — changing the rule again to allow Supreme Court nominees to be confirmed on a simple vote and confirming Neil Gorsuch and, later, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

But Levin said he did not intend for his questions to apply only to conservative groups but to any of those coming under the law.

Speaking about a former director’s script for an interview with Enron’s chief financial officer around that time, Levin said, “You can’t get much more deferential and obsequious

In 2013, Levin brought Apple executives before the subcommittee to raise attention to it parking some of its top assets — and their profits — in Irish subsidiaries that paid little in taxes

Levin never told CEO Tim Cook that his company broke the law but suggested such practices shortchanged U.S

"You can apologize to anyone you want," Levin told Paul