A high-profile Democrat who rose to power during Donald Trump’s first term wants to begin his second as the ranking minority member of the powerful House Oversight Committee, continuing a generational shift among House Democrats in the wake of Trump’s 2024 election victory.
In a letter to the House Democratic Caucus, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she is asking for their support to lead their party’s side of the committee, which is the lower chamber’s principal investigatory arm with the power to look into “any matter,” even those under the jurisdiction of other standing committees.
If successful, Ocasio-Cortez would gain the ranking member spot by bucking the seniority system that has long defined the party’s approach to committee leadership. Currently, the ranking member position on the panel is held by Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, but in the next Congress he will shift to the House Judiciary Committee after knocking off longtime ranking member Jerry Nadler of New York.
Raskin, a former constitutional law professor who first came to Congress in 2017, won enough support to push Nadler to give up the slot he’d earned after several decades on the judiciary panel after arguing that in the wake of Trump’s victory, a new generation of leaders is needed to counter his Republican allies on Capitol Hill.
In her letter, Ocasio-Cortez said the ranking member position on Oversight is “not a position I seek lightly” because the role during Trump’s second term will be “a profound and consequential one.”
“Now, more than ever, we must focus on the Committee’s strong history of both holding administrations accountable and taking on the economic precarity and inequality that is challenging the American way of life,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez also noted that Raskin had tapper her to be a “vice-ranking member” during the current Congress after he won the ranking spot following the departure of former chairwoman Carolyn Maloney at the end of the last Congress.
She praised what she described as Raskin’s “visionary leadership in combining a strong, disciplined, constitutional framework with the need to present a visceral, accessible story to the American people to fight against corruption and for economic and civil rights” and recalled how Democrats on the oversight panel had successfully pushed back against the impeachment inquiry led by Republican chairman James Comer of Kentucky over the last two years.
At the same time, Ocasio-Cortez said she would use her position to reach across the aisle to work with Republicans when the opportunity arises, so long as that work is on “constructive, shared interests that serve the American people.”
“In the 119th Congress, Oversight Committee Democrats will face an important task: we must balance our focus on the incoming president’s corrosive actions and corruption with a tangible fight to make life easier for America’s working class,” she said, adding that Democrats “cannot” and “will not” allow the GOP majority to use “their chaos to confuse, disorient, and distract the public’s attention away from their disastrous agenda.”
