The next ranking member of the House Oversight Committee will reportedly be nine-term Democrat Gerry Connolly of Virginia.
Connolly, 74, beat out his competitor, 35-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), 131-84 at a closed-door meeting on Tuesday, the Associated Press reports. The current Oversight ranking member, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), is vacating the post to replace Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) as ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, as my colleague Pema Levy reported last month. The Oversight Committee—which is now controlled by Republicans and chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.)—played a key role in holding President-elect Donald Trump and members of his administration accountable during his first term.
The news comes as Democrats have been grappling with how to move forward in the face of their losses of both the White House and the Senate last month, and their failure to recapture the House. While some pundits, and Democrats themselves, have called for a generational change in leadership—and some younger Democrats have indeed managed to oust their elders from committee leadership roles—that did not seem to have been enough of a concern to propel AOC to victory here. Lawmakers told Axios that while Connolly—who revealed last month he was recently diagnosed with esophagus cancer—campaigned on his experience, AOC emphasized her far-reaching platform and her role as an effective communicator for the party.
“Tried my best,” AOC wrote in a post on Bluesky after the vote. “Sorry I couldn’t pull it through everyone—we live to fight another day.”
“I think my colleagues were measuring their votes by who’s got experience, who is seasoned, who can be trusted, who’s capable and who’s got a record of productivity and I think that prevailed,” Connolly reportedly told journalists after the vote.
Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) told Axios she was “disappointed” by the outcome, adding, “I know Gerry will do a great job. But there’s no substitute for having someone in that position that literally has millions of Americans following her [on social media].” (AOC has 12.8 million followers on X and 8.1 million on Instagram; Connolly has just over 87,000 followers on both platforms combined.)
“I think that the seniority issue in this building gets in the way,” Balint added. “Our people back home, they don’t care about seniority.”
