Date: 2025-07-04 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00028593
DEMOCRATS
REPRESENTATIVE GERALD CONNOLLY
Gerald Connolly, 75, Top Democrat on House Oversight Committee, Is Dead
REPRESENTATIVE GERALD CONNOLLY
Gerald Connolly, 75, Top Democrat on House Oversight Committee, Is Dead
Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia in March.
The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, he announced
last year that he was being treated for cancer of the esophagus.
Credit...Nathan Posner/Anadolu, via Getty
Original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/us/politics/gerald-connolly-dead.html
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
The death of Representative Gerald Connolly at 75 years old is sad ... but old people dying is very normal.
Of course, 75 years old has now become a relatively young age ... I am still alive and I am 10 years older!
Representative Connolly has a good record in politics and he probably deserved to defeat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) when she challenged him for the leadership of the House Oversight Committee.
As an old person ... I prefer older ... I am of the view that my experience has value but the knowledge I have should be deployed carefully. I am in the middle of a major intellecutal effort to understand the changes that have happened in my lifetime.
I ended my formal education when I graduated from Cambridge University in the UK in 1961 when I was 21 years old.
My first commercial flight was in 1959 in a Douglas Dakota piston-engined aircraft designed in the 1930s, a workhorse during WWII and back then still in use with BEA (British European Airways). The changes I have been able to observe in my post university life have been huge ... but nowhere as good as they should have been. To a great extent, that is because too many older people hang on to power a long time after they should have stepped down.
In my own case I have not had formal 'employment' since I turned 60. But I have not been inactive! I remain 'free' to be critical ... but I don't get in the way of progress, some of which I do not understand. I am free to alert younger people in management to be aware of some things that are potentially dangerous, but maybe just dormant for the time being!.
As an older person, I am saddened by the weakening of true accountability in the modern world ... in society, the environment and the economic world. Why is it that in many important ways we do not seem to have progressed much since Queen Victoria was on the British throne!. Why do American young people seem to so badly educated and informed?
Peter Burgess
He had announced late last year that he was being treated for cancer of the esophagus. He told his constituents in April that he would not seek re-election.
May 21, 2025
Witten by Trip Gabriel
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
Christine Hauser contributed reporting.
Representative Gerald E. Connolly of Virginia, a feisty Democrat who prided himself on getting things done, and who defeated Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to become his party’s top member of the powerful House Oversight Committee, died on Wednesday at his home in Fairfax County, Va. He was 75.
His family announced the death. Mr. Connolly said late last year that he had esophageal cancer and would fight the disease. But in April, he told his constituents that the treatments had been unsuccessful and that he would not seek re-election in 2026.
A nine-term congressman from the affluent suburbs of Northern Virginia, Mr. Connolly vigorously defended the interests of the legions of government workers who live in his district, whether by extending the Washington Metro to their communities or by battling President Trump’s efforts to weaken civil service job protections for the federal work force.
Mr. Connolly fought an executive order issued by Mr. Trump in 2020, near the end of the president’s first term, to strip job protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants by reclassifying them as so-called Schedule F political appointees who could be fired at will. The order was reversed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
This year, as Mr. Trump launched his second term in office with shock-and-awe orders aimed at purging what he viewed as “deep state” resistance to his policies, Mr. Connolly spoke out.
“Trump is on a wrecking cruise to de-professionalize the civil service and threaten basic services to Americans,” he told The New York Times in January. “It’s unlawful firings and impoundments that threaten to unravel 142 years” of the tradition of a “civil service immune from partisan politics.”
Mr. Connolly acknowledged the cheers of the crowd alongside his
daughter, Caitlin Rose, and his wife, Cathy Smith, in 2008 after
being elected to the House of Representatives for the first time.
Credit...Steve Helber/Associated Press
Mr. Connolly was first elected to the House in 2008. His victory, in an open race to replace a retiring Republican, was part of a blue wave that year that heralded Virginia’s political realignment from a reliably red state to one that leans blue in federal elections.
An influx of immigrants and of high-tech jobs to Mr. Connolly’s district changed its demographics and its politics. He moved with those changes, evolving from a nuts-and-bolts proponent of infrastructure to a fiery critic of what he saw as ideological overreach by both Trump administrations.
As an increasingly visible member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, which lawmakers of both parties use to stymie presidents of the opposing party, Mr. Connolly led an ultimately successful effort to block the Trump White House from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
The Oversight Committee in 2019 sued Attorney General William P. Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for refusing to turn over documents about a citizenship question, which critics said was politically motivated to intimidate immigrants from census participation and to shrink the number of Democratic seats.
In December, Mr. Connolly vied with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a rising star of the left, in a generational contest for the top Democratic position on the Oversight Committee. Mr. Connolly’s bid was boosted by the endorsement and the active lobbying of Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House. House Democrats chose him in a secret ballot.
Mr. Connolly with his fellow Democratic representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez in 2019. He defeated her in a generational contest to
become the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee in December.
Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times
The often pugnacious Mr. Connolly criticized a Republican bill in 2024 to rename Dulles International Airport, some of whose employees live in his district, after Mr. Trump.
“If Republicans want to name something after him,” he told The Guardian, “I’d suggest they find a federal prison.”
Gerald Edward Connolly, who was known as Gerry, was born on March 30, 1950, in Boston. He was one three children of Edward Connolly, an insurance salesman, and Mary Therese (O’Kane) Connolly, a registered nurse.
He received a B.A. in literature from Maryknoll College in Glen Ellyn, Ill., and an M.A. in public administration from Harvard University in 1979.
His survivors include his wife, Cathy Smith, and their daughter, Caitlin.
For a decade, from 1979 to 1989, Mr. Connolly worked as a staff member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Years later, as a member of Congress, he held a seat on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Before serving in Congress for 16 years, Mr. Connolly was on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors for 14 years, beginning in 1995. He was elected chairman in 2003. He promoted the transformation of the county hub at Tysons Corner from a sprawl of shopping malls into a major office center.
As a supervisor, he dreamed of extending the Washington Metro deep into the Virginia suburbs. When he reached Congress, he helped procure funding for the Silver Line, which was built out to Tysons Corner in 2014.
“I know this is going to sound corny,” he told The Washington Post that year, “but I look out at that now, and my heart soars.”
Christine Hauser contributed reporting.
April 28, 2025
A version of this article appears in print on May 23, 2025, Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: Gerald E. Connolly, 75, Top Democrat On Oversight Committee in the House. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
See more on: U.S. Politics, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, U.S. House of Representatives, Democratic Party
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