Nita M. Lowey, a veteran legislator from New York who served 16 terms until her retirement at the end of the 116th Congress, died on Saturday. The cause was breast cancer, her family announced. She was 87.
Lowey, a Democrat, represented well-heeled Rockland and Westchester counties during her tenure in the House starting after the 1988 elections, when she flipped a seat then held by a Republican, Joseph J. DioGuardi.
She won a seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee in 1993, where she forged close relationships with two other women who were also rising stars in the party: Reps. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Pelosi would go on to become the first female speaker in House history.
Two decades later, when the top Democratic slot on the spending panel opened up, Lowey leapfrogged the more senior Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, to win the position, thanks in part to her bond with Pelosi, then the minority leader.
Foreign aid, health care focus
Lowey and Pelosi served together on the old Foreign Operations subcommittee throughout the 1990s and early 2000s until Pelosi took a leave of absence from the Appropriations panel upon becoming Democratic leader in 2003.
Like Pelosi, Lowey was a trailblazer, becoming the first woman of either party to hold a chair or ranking member slot on Appropriations.
“Chairwoman Lowey built a brighter, more hopeful future — for her beloved New York constituents and for all Americans,” Pelosi said in a statement Sunday. “I traveled the world with Nita for years and saw the esteem in which she was held by heads of state and women and girls in poverty who knew her mission was the education of women and girls. She was beloved.”
Lowey also served with Pelosi, as well as DeLauro, on the Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations Subcommittee.
Small of stature and soft-spoken, Lowey had a reputation for savvy negotiating and fierce dedication to progressive values.
In a statement Sunday, DeLauro — Lowey’s successor as the panel’s top Democrat — recalled that her friend earned a reputation as the “perfumed ice pick.” She cited Lowey’s work on doubling National Institutes of Health funding between 1998 and 2003, ensuring women and minorities had access to NIH clinical trials and helping enact a breast cancer education program.
“She was courageous, humorous, and tenacious with a smile that lit up even the darkest rooms,” DeLauro said. “I am heartbroken by this loss, but Nita’s legacy lives on.”
Lowey was chair or ranking member of the State-Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee for six years before ascending to the ranking member position on the full committee.
There she became close with former Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, who was her party’s top foreign aid appropriator and eventually became the first woman on her side of the aisle to lead her party on the full Appropriations panel. When Granger took over the full committee ranking member position in 2019, it was the first time two women were in charge of the full committee.
Lowey was an outspoken opponent of the so-called Mexico City policy, which bars U.S. funding for overseas family planning programs or nongovernmental organizations that perform or promote abortions.
Lowey, who was Jewish, was also a staunch defender of U.S. aid to Israel and defending that country’s interests. AIPAC, an advocacy group, in a statement called Lowey an “indefatigable advocate for the necessary resources for the Jewish state to defend itself.”
In 2019, Lowey earned her first primary challenge since being elected three decades earlier, from a young Westchester County attorney, Mondaire Jones. Months later, Lowey announced her retirement, clearing a path for Jones to win the heavily Democratic district in the 2020 elections.
Redistricting in 2022 wound up costing Jones him his seat when he lost to Rep. Dan Goldman in a redrawn district; last year, Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., fended off Jones’ attempt at a comeback.
Two shutdowns
During Lowey’s tenure as top Appropriations Democrat, she had to contend with two of the longest partial government shutdowns in congressional history.
The first was in 2013, when House Republicans in charge of the chamber insisted on trying to use a must-pass stopgap funding measure to block the rollout of the health insurance exchanges set up under then-President Barack Obama’s signature health care law, enacted in 2010.
Democrats held out, and after 16 days and with the nation about to breach its statutory borrowing cap, Republicans finally relented and allowed legislation to pass, reopening the government and suspending the Treasury Department’s debt limit.
Then in late 2018 after Democrats won back control of the House in the midterms, President Donald Trump — then in his first term — wouldn’t sign spending legislation unless it funded big increases for his signature priority: the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
Again, Democrats held out, and after 34 full days, Trump relented and agreed to sign legislation reopening the government with status-quo wall funding, but with a twist: Trump tapped existing statutory authorities to pull money from other accounts towards the wall project.
Lowey brought a classic appropriator mentality to her role: a belief that without meddling from party leadership or other outside forces, the “four corners” of the Appropriations panels in both chambers could always cut a deal and do what needed to be done.
“It’s common sense: When you have a problem in appropriations, it’s not like an authorizing committee, where you can debate and debate. We have to bring it to a conclusion,” Lowey said in a 2019 interview. “There will be some issues where we may not agree, and that’s when it’s nice to be in the majority rather than the minority.”
Lowey also led Democrats’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including their push for a $2 trillion-plus aid package in the fall of 2020 when an initial tranche of relief began to run out. That measure stalled in the face of GOP opposition, and Democrats eventually compromised in late 2020 on a bill less than half that size.
Lowey was born in the Bronx, a few blocks from Yankee Stadium. She eventually got married and settled in Queens, where she got her start in politics in 1974, when she volunteered for the campaign of a neighbor: Mario M. Cuomo, then running for lieutenant governor.
Though Cuomo lost the primary, he was tapped for a role in new Democratic Gov. Hugh L. Carey’s administration and brought Lowey with him as an aide.
She moved to Westchester in the mid-1980s, and made a splash during her 1988 primary campaign when she defeated Hamilton Fish V, publisher of The Nation magazine.
None of her House races from that point on were particularly close, though she passed up a chance to run for Senate in 2000, clearing the field for former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
When Clinton later lost in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary to Obama, she ended up serving under Obama as secretary of State, creating another Senate opening. At this point having ascended to a powerful perch with accumulated seniority on Appropriations, Lowey again skipped the chance to become New York’s junior senator.
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