Congress
Robert Garcia elected to lead House Oversight Democrats
California Rep. Robert Garcia will be the next top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee after beating Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch in a 150-63 caucus vote Tuesday.
Garcia, 47, won a first-ballot majority after winning the backing of the caucus’ powerful Steering and Policy Committee Monday evening.
Serving just his second term in Congress, Garcia has quickly risen through the ranks. He’s currently a member of Democratic Caucus leadership and served as a co-chair of Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign.
In a contest that had tested House Democrats’ desire to set aside its penchant to reward seniority in favor of promoting younger voices, Garcia had pitched himself to his colleagues as a consensus candidate with managerial experience as a former mayor of Long Beach.
In a previous interview with POLITICO, he called it “premature” to impeach President Donald Trump without buy-in from other Democrats — a contrast with other young progressives who have sought to kick-start the process. And he’s emphasized that the committee under his leadership would do more than probe the Trump administration.
Democrats have been maneuvering for the top Oversight job since April, when Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly announced he would step aside from the job amid a battle with cancer. He died in May at 75.
For weeks, the race pitted two senior Democrats — Lynch, 70, and Maryland Rep. Kweisi Mfume, 76 — against two insurgent young progressives — Garcia and Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett, 44. Crockett and Mfume dropped out of the race Tuesday after falling short in the Steering test vote.
“If you are going to be in leadership, you need to know that you have a team that is ready and willing to work with you,” Crockett told reporters Tuesday. “It was clear by the numbers that my style of leadership is not exactly what [Democrats] were looking for, and so I didn’t think that it was fair for me to push forward and try to rebuke that.”
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s decision not to run a second time for the Oversight post and to instead stay on the Energy and Commerce Committee helped open up the field.
Connolly’s race last year against the 35-year-old Ocasio-Cortez was similarly seen as a generational challenge within the caucus. But senior Democrats — including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi — lined up behind Connolly, quashing efforts for a changing of the party’s old guard.
This time, the party’s elders were split in the race. Pelosi never endorsed Garcia, but she had met with her fellow Californian as the contest ramped up and was widely seen in the caucus as a Garcia ally.
“I’m a Californian,” she said as the voting was underway Tuesday. “I’m partial to mayors.”
Some of the most powerful blocs in the party opted to remain on the sidelines. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus endorsed Garcia, who was the sole Latino candidate in the race and will be one of two Latino committee leaders along with Rep. Nydia Velázquez. But groups like the Congressional Black Caucus, New Democrat Coalition and the Congressional Progressive Caucus did not make endorsements.
House Republicans have advanced a bill that would prohibit members of Congress and their family members from trading on certain Washington-focused prediction markets.
The House Administration Committee’s GOP members on Wednesday voted along party lines in favor of the legislation, which proposes to bar lawmakers, their spouses and their dependent children from participating on prediction markets that are based on the outcome of elections or government actions.
It marks the latest in Capitol Hill’s efforts to curb the threat of insider trading on the prediction markets — a risk that has burst into the spotlight in recent months after a series of well-timed trades around the capture of then-Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, Google’s search results and the Iran war. Earlier this year, the Senate banned its members and their staffs from trading on the prediction markets altogether, effective immediately.
And yet, the House Administration Committee vote also revealed a fracture within the House over how far to go in clamping down on lawmakers’ use of the prediction markets. Democrats opposed the bill, saying it didn’t go far enough, while Republicans supported it.
Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, who is the committee’s top Democrat, argued that the legislation is “so filled with loopholes that it looks more like a sieve than a bill.” Instead of passing such a bill, he said the House should follow the Senate’s lead and approve a new and broader resolution aimed at prediction market use among members and their staffs.
“The Senate did it in a matter of minutes — no six-month grace period, no procedurally laborious process,” Morelle said. “They just went to the floor with a two-page resolution and banned it all unanimously. We should do the same.”
House Administration Chair Bryan Steil, who introduced the bill, hit back at his Democratic counterpart’s concerns by questioning why members’ families shouldn’t be allowed to bet on sports through the prediction markets — but can through sportsbooks or casinos.
The Wisconsin Republican pointed to a hypothetical scenario where a member’s child is at college and bets on a sporting event through a prediction market platform. That situation, he said, could be covered by a broader prohibition.
Steil, rather, said his bill is aimed at addressing public policy- and election-focused markets.
“Lawmakers elect to serve the American people, not to enrich themselves by wagering on outcomes from the decisions they make,” he said. “We have a real opportunity to restore trust in Congress by taking necessary steps to eliminate even the appearance of impropriety.”
House Republican leaders canceled plans to advance a procedural measure Wednesday that would set up passage of two fiscal 2027 appropriations bills and other legislation this week, according to three people granted anonymity to describe the decision ahead of a public announcement.
The decision comes amid pressure from GOP hard-liners to prioritize passage of the SAVE America Act, a Republican elections bill that has stalled in the Senate — and after President Donald Trump refused to sign a high-profile bipartisan housing bill passed Tuesday, also in a bid to get the elections bill moving.
Speaker Mike Johnson and other leaders are expected to keep members in Washington for now while they determine next steps, the people said.
Hours after Democratic socialist candidates swept to victory in New York primary races, Republicans celebrated those victories as a boon for their own party as it struggles against headwinds from the Iran war and cost of living issues ahead of the November midterms.
Inside a closed-door House GOP meeting Wednesday morning, the head of the Republican campaign arm said the victories of candidates backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani offered an opportunity for GOP House candidates to draw a sharp contrast.
Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina said “Democrats have a Bolshevik revolution going on in their primaries,” according to three people in the room granted anonymity to discuss the private event.
Speaker Mike Johnson also delivered remarks to Republicans setting the stakes of the election after the “radical” left-wing wins and urging Republicans to dig in and raise money to defeat Democrats this fall. He received a standing ovation, the people in the room said.
Hudson said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will take the socialists’ wins as a sign he needs to navigate further to the left. There will be no cooperation with Republicans, he added.
Other Republicans publicly seized on the left-wing triumphs Wednesday, including Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio — who said “the lesson is clear: if Republicans don’t act now, we will lose this country as we know it.”
“We need to be clear about what we stand for,” he wrote on X. “Closed borders, secure elections, economic prosperity for all Americans, and, most of all, proudly protecting the American way of life against socialism.”
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