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Who’s running to lead House Democrats on Oversight, and what does it mean?
Once again, House Democrats are jockeying for the top minority spot on the House Oversight Committee. Just seven months ago, party veteran Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) beat out progressive media darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for the job. Connolly died on May 21. Now four Democrats are scrambling to lock down committee support before the June 24 leadership vote.This race matters. For a party in the minority, oversight provides one of the few remaining tools to challenge the majority and to manage the frustration of disillusioned voters. We covered the last contest in December, just as Donald Trump prepared to reclaim the White House. Connolly’s win, despite his age and battle with esophageal cancer, signaled a possible turn away from performative social media theatrics toward more traditional, procedural oversight.While Stephen Lynch is out of step with the activist class, his voting record demonstrates party loyalty. Expect him to be a serious contender.Connolly’s death reopens the field. So what do the current contenders — and their backers — tell us about where the Democrats stands now?Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.): Lynch grew up in South Boston, the son of an ironworker. His politics and worldview reflect that gritty upbringing. At the time, “Southie” held the dubious distinction of being the poorest white neighborhood in America — plagued by crime, targeted by outsider liberal policies, and ignored by the nonprofit class that preferred more fashionable causes.He followed his father into ironworking and quickly climbed the ranks, becoming the youngest union president in its history before pivoting to law school. His early record wasn’t spotless. He admitted to smoking pot at a Willie Nelson concert and once roughed up Iranian students protesting the United States. As a lawyer, he defended kids charged in racially charged street brawls — cases that mirrored the tensions he grew up with.Lynch entered state politics to push back against outside pressure — most notably from gay activists demanding to march in South Boston’s kid-friendly, Catholic-rooted St. Patrick’s Day parade. He championed exemptions to Massachusetts hate-crime laws and brought his blue-collar populism with him to Washington. When he entered Congress in the 1990s, Lynch stood firmly pro-life and pro-marriage.Like many of his fellow Democrats, however, Lynch moved with the party and his district. Southie is developed these days: cleaned up and expensive as heck. You’ll see yuppies and rainbow flags now, and industry has been replaced with waterfront condos. Like so many of his once-Blue Dog, working-class colleagues, he’s now pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, and pro-all-the-rest-of-it. He voted 100% with President Joe Biden’s agenda.Even his perfect voting record isn’t enough for the purists, however. His opponents within the party are annoyed that he doesn’t mouth all their maxims and revolutionary slogans. They see him as a relic of the past and cite his vote against Obamacare and his opposition to the decidedly anti-working-class Green New Deal, as well as his yea vote for the Laken Riley Act that would detain and deport illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes in the United States.While Lynch is out of step with the activist class, his voting record demonstrates party loyalty. Moreover, he's the acting ranking member now that Connolly has passed. Ocasio-Cortez cited the committee Democrats’ continued deference to seniority in her reason not to run for the job again. Expect Lynch to be a serious contender.Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.): Mfume was born Frizzell Gerard Tate in Baltimore in 1948. While not the acting ranking member of the committee, he is a senior member of the party, having first won a seat in Congress when Ronald Reagan was president.He has a place of prestige within the Congressional Black Caucus and even served as its chairman in the early 1990s — a relationship that will be tested in his run against another member in the Oversight fight. He took a break from Congress in the mid-1990s to serve as president of the NAACP — another prominent post in the black American political power structure.As with Lynch, progressive activists question Mfume’s purity, even though he voted with Biden 100% of the time. His sins include thinking the Green New Deal, decriminalizing illegal border crossing, and Medicaid for All were dumb ideas. He’s also pro-Israel, which is a big no-no. Finally, while he's perfectly pro-abortion, he doesn’t talk about it enough. Very troubling! His opponents within the party call him a “Washington insider,” and they’re right — but past attempts to primary him from the left have failed.Like Lynch, Mfume is a contender, but is threatened by a younger, angrier, more social media-friendly competitor.Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas): The youngest contender for the post is Crockett, who just came to Congress two years ago but has already made a name for herself nationally.Though well into her 40s, Crockett’s use of social media, confrontational style, and borderline antics have made her a star for young left-wing activists. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the broader public became aware of her, but it’s probably right around the time she made headlines in a catfight with conservative activist darling Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) last spring.It began with Taylor Greene insulting Crockett’s fake eyelashes. The Texan responded in turn, asking Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), “If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody's bleach-blonde, bad-built butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”“A what now?” a deeply out-of-his-element Comer replied. And the rest was history, so long as you consider it history to record videos dancing with her tongue out in the halls of Congress; to call for knocking Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) “over the head, like, hard, right? Like, there is no niceties with him, like at all”; say Elon Musk had to be “taken down”; and accuse black Republicans of not being black any more.If Crockett didn't exist, conservative media would have to create her. Still, her aggressive tactics and style have earned her a following with voters angry over Democrats’ national failures and perceived sheepishness in the face of Trump’s popularity. She’s not the most likely to win leadership on a committee that historically values seniority over activist popularity, but she could take votes from fellow CBC member Mfume.Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.): Last but not least, we come to Garcia, a 47-year-old foreign-born progressive, more closely aligned with the Squad than other contenders.Garcia came to Congress with the same class as Crockett and instantly gained attention for snubbing the Bible, instead taking his oath of office on a copy of the Constitution, a picture of his parents, and the first issue of “Superman,” borrowed from the Library of Congress. How progressive!Back in the real world, though, Garcia rarely passes up a progressive cause. He joined the long line of politicians who flew to El Salvador to defend illegal-immigrant gang members Trump deported. He also never misses a chance to highlight his status as one of the first openly gay figures to do this or that — quick to lead with identity when it serves his agenda.How much will this mean in a committee vote, however? Probably less than you’d think. That doesn’t mean Garcia doesn’t have a bright future, however. That is, if his side wins the party’s civil war.Beltway Brief, Dec. 2024: Who will win the battle for the Resistance 2.0?Sign up for Bedford’s newsletterSign up to get Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford’s newsletter.