Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) secured the highest Democratic seat on the highly effective Home Oversight and Authorities Reform Committee on Tuesday, profitable a vote of the total Home Democratic Caucus within the crowded race to interchange former Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who died final month of esophageal most cancers.
Garcia bested one other committee Democrat, Rep. Stephen Lynch (Mass.), within the closed-door, secret-ballot vote within the Capitol basement.
The 150-63 vote places Garcia on the dais of one in every of Congress’s most potent committees, one with subpoena powers and a sweeping jurisdiction that covers nearly each aspect of the federal authorities. Whereas the minority Democrats haven’t any authority to dictate the panel’s course within the present Congress, they’ve an excellent shot at flipping management of the Home in subsequent 12 months’s midterms — a situation that may put the gavel in Garcia’s hand and lend him broad powers to research the numerous controversial actions of the second Trump administration.
Garcia’s victory is extraordinary for a lawmaker so inexperienced, as he is solely in his third 12 months on Capitol Hill. And it is particularly putting in a caucus that has an extended custom of rewarding seniority, and the expertise that comes with it, when selecting committee leaders. Certainly, Connolly in December had simply received the seat over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) — a transparent victory for seniority that dissuaded Ocasio-Cortez from looking for the seat once more after Connolly’s loss of life.
But the choice given to committee veterans has eroded step by step lately, as Democrats have sought a generational shift to a youthful crop of leaders after many years with extra senior members on the helm.
That shift appeared to decrease the benefit of Lynch, 70, essentially the most senior of the 4 candidates who has served because the interim rating member of the committee since Connolly’s deteriorating well being compelled him to step down in April. A former ironworker and union chief, Lynch had argued that his expertise within the Oversight trenches made him greatest suited to take the seat completely.
However his pitch wasn’t sufficient to beat the problem from Garcia, who was endorsed by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, of which he’s a member, and appeared additionally to get a lift from his colleagues in California, which boasts the biggest Democratic delegation within the Home.
