Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) on Monday claimed the first round of the two-step contest to lead Democrats on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee in the next Congress, besting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to win the recommendation of the Democrats’ influential Steering and Policy Committee.
The 34-27 vote lends a boost to Connolly, the more senior of the two candidates, heading into a vote of the full Caucus later in the week. The Steering and Policy panel is headed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and is packed with leadership allies.
A vote of the panel — while essentially symbolic — also sends a signal to the broader caucus about which candidate the party brass deems to be stronger.
But it is not the final word. That will come from the full House Democratic Caucus, which is scheduled to vote Tuesday in a secret ballot that will decide which Democrat will replace the outgoing ranking member of the Oversight panel, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).
Raskin stepped out of the seat to challenge Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) as the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. Raskin won that challenge after Nadler dropped out of the race.
With subpoena power and a broad mandate to investigate federal affairs, the Oversight Committee is among the most prominent of the House panels, particularly when it comes to scrutinizing the actions of the White House. And Democrats see the seat as carrying outsized weight next year given their warnings about President-elect Trump and the threat they say he poses to the country’s democratic traditions.
Connolly has been on the Oversight Committee for the entirety of his 16-year tenure in the House, and he’s leaned heavily on that experience to argue that he’s the better fit to push back against Trump and his ambitious second-term policy agenda. Connolly last month announced he’s been diagnosed with esophagus cancer, but he began treatment immediately and has been participating in votes and other events around the Capitol.
Ocasio-Cortez, a six-year veteran of Capitol Hill, has said it’s time for a new generation of younger Democrats to take the reins of the party and refresh it with new ideas. That argument builds on her primary victory in 2018 over former Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.), a caucus chair thought to be in line for the Speakership. The upset stunned Washington and made Ocasio-Cortez an icon on the left.
While a recommendation from the Steering and Policy Committee is typically a good predictor of how the full caucus will vote, that’s not always the rule. In 2014, for instance, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) won the recommendation of the Steering panel in her challenge against Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) to lead Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee. Pallone prevailed, however, when every House Democrat got the chance to vote.
