Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) Wins Chair of House Oversight Committee

Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), flanked by Democratic Caucus Chair Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) Photo: Chip Somodevilla via Axios

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) will become the first woman to chair the House Oversight Committee, winning the important assignment by defeating Gerry Connolly (D-VA) with 133 votes against Connolly’s 86.

Maloney has been acting as the committee's chair since the Oct. 17 death of Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.). Her gavel will immediately thrust the Congresswoman into the limelight, with the Oversight’s key role in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.

Rep. Jim Jordan, (R-OH) is known to be a particularly abrasive, heavy-hammer, take-no-prisoners Republican leader on the committee, prompting Connolly to run on the quiet platform that dealing with Jordan is a man’s job.

Given his uninformed, pure badgering performance in this week’s intelligence committee impeachment hearings, Maloney’s supporters dismissed the argument as sexist. Supporters insisted that it was key to have a female voice alongside the two other white men leading the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

Maloney secured endorsements from top Democrats like House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), who is also the most powerful black member in Congress. Her promise to focus on important issues beyond investigating Trump was welcome news for moderates “squeezed by the ongoing impeachment furor”, writes Politico.

NY Dem. Rep. Carolyn Maloney Soldiers On As Passionate Advocate For Women's History Museum

NEW YORK DEMOCRAT CONGRESSWOMAN CAROLYN MALONEY IS INTERVIEWED BY TODAY IN 2014 WITH ROOMMATES DEMOCRAT CONGRESSWOMEN DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ OF FLORIDA AND TERRI SEWELL OF ALABAMA AT HER HOME IN WASHINGTON, DC. MALONEY'S HUSBAND CLIFTON MALONEY DIED IN 2009 MOUNTAIN-CLIMBING IN TIBET.

New York Congresswoman Democrat Carolyn Maloney's Manhattan district includes Trump Tower, making Maloney the primary advocate who is personally lobbying Trump himself and his senior administration officials to support legislation that would finally birth a Smithsonian museum dedicated to women's history on the National Mall.

Politico writes that Maloney was handing out folders of material on the museum, handing them out to Trump and his (few) top female advisors at a congressional picnic in June. 

“I talked to Ivanka about it, I talked to Melania about it, I talked to Karen Pence about it, I talked to Kellyanne [Conway] about it,” Maloney said. “I handed it directly to the president and he said he would read it. I asked Kellyanne for advice on how to approach it. She said to talk to the president directly, she said she would not do it on my behalf.”

Maloney said she had another chance to bond with Conway on the dance floor last weekend at a star-studded party at Washington doyenne Lally Weymouth’s Hamptons summer home. “I thought, ‘Hey, this is my chance to lobby her,’” Maloney said of the party, which was also attended by George Soros, Steven Spielberg, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, among others. “I kept working her over.”

In 2014, President Obama approved the creation of a commission to evaluate the need and feasibility for creating the women's history museum, whose funding would come from private donors and not taxpayers. 

“Right now, we’re only ten months into our brand new African-American Museum, and our next big capital project is a complete revitalization of the Air and Space Museum, which will be $650 million,” said Smithsonian spokeswoman Linda St. Thomas. “It would be very difficult for us to handle a new building right now.”

More feasible than a stand-alone women’s museum, St. Thomas said, was doing “a better job of telling the story of women’s history” across the existing museums. There's little doubt that a Hillary Clinton administration would be more receptive to a women's history museum. 

In May 2017 Elle touched base with Maloney, who has served in the House since 1992 as part of the largest female contingent ever voted into the DC House of Representatives. Maloney, a life-long advocate of women's rights quickly bonded with then 10-term Democrat Patricia Schroeder who tells the story of her own arrival in DC. "Congress "is about Chivas Regal, thousand-dollar bills, Learjets, and beautiful women," one of Schroeder's male colleagues told her upon her arrival. "Why are you here?" Read on at Elle to learn more about Rep. Carolyn Maloney's women's-history-rich story.

Bishop Walker Nickless Calls Contraception Mandate A Plot By The Devil

Among the guests on the Family Research Council’s anti-contraception coverage webcast held last week was Walker Nickless, the Bishop of the Diocese of Sioux City, who warned that the contraception mandate was literally a plot by the Devil to undermine morality and that Christians “have to stand up and violently oppose this” in order to avoid being overtaken by Darkness.

The Bishop’s comments ignore the large number of prominent Catholic organizations, universities and hospital organization led by Catholic priests and nuns who support the Obama compromise on contraception. But they align perfectly with the Vatican’s exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth, a man who says he has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession in 25 years. In March 2010, Father Amorth proclaimed that “the Devil is a work inside the Vatican.”

Time will tell whether today’s spectacle of today’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s hearing on President Obama’s recent contraception mandate will be an Anita Hill moment, writes Politico.

“I think it is an Anita Hill comparison,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), who staged a walkout of Democratic women in protest of the chairman’s decision not to seat a minority female witness at the start of the hearing. “I hope it will be just as galvanizing.”