Nita M. Lowey, who represented a congressional district primarily based in Westchester County for 32 years, ardently supporting liberal causes and enjoying a key position in shaping laws to advance them, died on Saturday at her dwelling in Harrison, N.Y. She was 87.
Her dying was introduced by her household, which mentioned she had metastatic breast most cancers.
A Democrat who charmed her constituents and fellow politicians with a heat, grandmotherly picture — she was 51 when she was first elected to the Home of Representatives in 1988 — Ms. Lowey was additionally a savvy negotiator on the Home Appropriations Committee, the highly effective physique influential in enacting authorities spending legal guidelines.
She served on the committee for almost all of her time in Washington and rose to be the primary lady to steer it. Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who was Home speaker when Ms. Lowey steered the committee and with whom Ms. Lowey was intently allied, referred to as Ms. Lowey a “grasp legislator” who “is each gracious and tenacious” and seeks “to seek out widespread floor the place she will and stands her floor the place she will’t.”
Consultant Henry J. Hyde, an Illinois Home Republican who tangled with Ms. Lowey, cautioned colleagues to not be misled by her kindly demeanor.
“She will be able to make you smile whilst you’re bleeding,” Mr. Hyde mentioned. “We name that the perfumed ice decide.”
All through her Home tenure, Ms. Lowey sponsored or helped mould laws with the intention of advancing, or no less than defending, main causes atop the liberal agenda. They included girls’s rights to abortions and well being providers, larger federal funding for homeless applications and low-cost housing, and baby care and early teaching programs.
She voted in opposition to a invoice in 1999 that may make it a federal crime for an grownup to take a minor to a different state for an abortion to keep away from a parental notification regulation within the woman’s dwelling state. “This invoice may throw grandmothers in jail for serving to their granddaughters,” she mentioned.
She opposed the coverage of two Republican presidents, George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, that banned federal support to organizations worldwide that supplied abortions or details about them, calling the coverage a “merciless and unprecedented assault on the world’s most susceptible girls.”
She decried sexual harassment and in 1991 was certainly one of a gaggle of feminine Home members who marched to the Senate facet of the Capitol to demand that the Senate Judiciary Committee hear Anita Hill’s accusations in opposition to Clarence Thomas in his Supreme Courtroom nomination listening to. The Senate later confirmed him for the seat.
Ms. Lowey was equally dogged on points necessary to the New York area. Moreover its giant swath of Westchester, her district additionally included a part of adjoining Rockland County and the Bronx and Queens.
Ms. Lowey pushed adamantly throughout negotiations with the Bush administration to maintain it from watering down the president’s promise of $20 billion to assist New York Metropolis get better after the terrorist assaults of Sept. 11, 2001.
She pressed federal regulators to start shutting down the Indian Level nuclear energy plant in Westchester. “No quantity of vitality capability may outweigh the chance {that a} poorly managed nuclear facility poses to our area,” Ms. Lowey instructed The Occasions in 2008. She additionally fought a Republican-proposed revision of the Clear Water Act that she argued would hinder the cleanup of Lengthy Island Sound.
In the course of the first Trump administration, Ms. Lowey mentioned she would resist his “misplaced priorities,” together with constructing a wall on the Mexican border whereas chopping home spending “crucial to hardworking American households.”
Over the course of her congressional profession, Ms. Lowey sometimes upset her fellow liberals. She voted early in her tenure for against the law invoice that included capital punishment for some offenses, although she opposed the dying penalty. Crime was peaking amid rampant crack cocaine use, and he or she mentioned that she had voted for the invoice “as a result of I feel it’s so necessary that we take a robust place on getting crime off our streets.”
Ms. Lowey, who was a robust supporter of Israel, voted in opposition to the 2015 deal that her fellow Democrat, President Barack Obama, reached with Iran to curb its nuclear weapons program. “In my judgment,” she mentioned, “enough safeguards will not be in place to deal with the dangers related to the settlement,” which had been joined by a number of different nations.
After Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York introduced his retirement, Ms. Lowey introduced in 1999 that she would run for his seat provided that Hillary Rodham Clinton, then mentioned to be contemplating a candidacy, selected to not run. Mrs. Clinton did run, and went on to win the seat.
Nita Sue Melnikoff was born within the Bronx on July 5, 1937, to Jack and Beatrice Melnikoff. Her father was an accountant, and her mom was a homemaker lively in civic and charitable teams.
After graduating from the Bronx Excessive Faculty of Science and, in 1959, Mount Holyoke School, Ms. Lowey labored in promoting for 2 years earlier than marrying Stephen Lowey, a lawyer, with whom she raised two daughters and a son in Queens after which in Harrison.
Moreover her husband of 64 years, she is survived by their youngsters Dana Lowey Luttway, Jackie Lowey and Douglas Lowey, and eight grandchildren.
From 1975 to 1988 Ms. Lowey labored within the New York secretary of state’s workplace on financial improvement and neighborhood preservation. She was additionally lively with politically oriented girls’s teams, and in 1988 ran for a Westchester congressional seat in opposition to the two-term Republican incumbent, Joseph J. DioGuardi.
She defeated two Democratic major opponents, Dennis Mehiel, a enterprise proprietor, and Hamilton Fish V, whose father on the time represented an adjoining congressional district.
Ms. Lowey then campaigned on the theme that Mr. DioGuardi was a “cheerleader” for the conservative Republican administration of President Ronald Reagan and “has not stood up for our priorities,” comparable to offering enough funds for housing and homeless applications in Westchester. Mr. DioGuardi mentioned she was distorting his document. She received 53 p.c of the vote.
In her re-election races Ms. Lowey by no means had a Democratic major opponent, and he or she received the overall elections by substantial or overwhelming margins. She had no opponent in any respect in 2016.
She introduced in October 2019 that she wouldn’t run for an additional time period, saying that after three a long time she had “determined the time was proper” to depart the Home. She mentioned a suggestion {that a} potential major problem that 12 months had factored into her determination was “ridiculous.” She was succeeded in workplace by Mondaire Jones, a fellow Democrat.
Her proudest achievement, she mentioned, had been “breaking the glass ceiling for ladies” by turning into the primary to steer the Appropriations Committee.
