Joe Crowley Biography | Joe Crowley Wiki
Joe Crowley is an American politician and lobbyist who served as U.S. Representative from New York’s 14th congressional district from 1999 to 2019. In 2018, he was defeated by Democratic primary challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in what was viewed as one of the largest upsets of the midterm elections.
During his tenure, Crowley served as Chair of the House Democratic Caucus from 2017 to 2019, as well as the local chairman of the Queens County Democratic Party from 2006 to 2019. He previously served in the New York State Assembly from 1987 to 1998. After leaving Congress, he joined the Washington, D.C., lobbying and law firm Squire Patton Boggs.
Joe Crowley Age
Joe Crowley is a 56-year-old politician born on March 16, 1962, in New York City, New York.
Joe Crowley Family
Joe Crowley was born to Joseph F. Crowley who was an Irish American and Eileen Crowley who emigrated from County Armagh, Northern Ireland. His father served in the United States Army during the Korean War, he later became a lawyer and a Police Department detective in New York. He is the cousin of former New York City Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley.
Joe Crowley Wife | Joe Crowley Children
Joe Crowley is married to Kasey Crowley, a registered nurse. They have three children: Cullen, Kenzie, and Liam. He is the cousin of former New York City Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley the couples were blessed with three children Cullen Crowley, Kenzie Crowley, and Liam Crowley.
Joe Crowley Education
Joe Crowley attended private Roman Catholic schools in the city, graduating from Power Memorial Academy in Manhattan in 1981. He graduated from Queens College in 1985 with a degree in political science and communications.
New York Assembly
He was a member of the New York State Assembly from 1987 to 1998, sitting in the 187th, 188th, 189th, 190th, 191st, and 192nd New York State Legislatures. Because of his Irish roots, he quickly became involved in Irish-American politics throughout New York.
Joe Crowley Campaign
Joe Crowley was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1998. The seat was considered open after incumbent Thomas J. Manton retired. He was again re-elected in the next nine elections. He did not face any primary challengers in the 2006 to 2016 election.
On June 26, 2018, Democratic primary for New York’s 14th congressional district, Crowley was defeated by challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who received 57% of the vote. He remained still on the general election ballot under the Working Families Party line.
Ocasio-Cortez called on Crowley to take his name off the ballot, but he responded that he could not unless he moved, died, was convicted of a felony, or filed to run for another office in November as a paper candidate (which he claimed would be a form of electoral fraud).
Joe Crowley Net Worth
Joe Crowley is an American politician and lobbyist who has an estimated net worth of $50 million dollars as of 2019.
Joe Crowley U.S House of Representatives
Democratic Congressman Thomas J. Manton retired from the Congress in 1999, having already filed for and circulated petitions for reelection. He withdrew on the last day it was legally possible to do so and arranged for Crowley, his chosen successor, to replace him on the ballot.
Joe Crowley wasn’t aware of this until Manton phoned him to tell him his name would be on the general election ballot. Prior to redistricting for the 2012 election, Crowley represented the 7th District, which encompassed portions of Queens and the Bronx.
It included neighborhoods such as Woodside, Jackson Heights, East Elmhurst, and College Point, in Queens as well as the neighborhoods of Castle Hill, Co-op City, Parkchester, Throgs Neck, Morris Park, Pelham Parkway, Pelham Bay, Country Club, and City Island in the eastern Bronx.
After 2013 Crowley represented New York’s 14th congressional district, which includes the eastern Bronx and part of north-central Queens. The Queens portion includes the neighborhoods of Sunnyside, Astoria, College Point, East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, Corona, and Woodside.
The Bronx portion of the district includes the neighborhoods of Morris Park, Parkchester, Pelham Bay, and Throgs Neck as well as City Island. On June 26, 2018, Crowley was defeated in the Democratic primary by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Joe Crowley Committee assignments
Committee on Ways and Means
Subcommittee on Social Security
Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures
Joe Crowley Caucus memberships
Ad Hoc Committee on Irish Affairs, Co-Chair
Rare Disease Congressional Caucus, Co-Chair
Congressional Musicians Caucus, Founder and Chair
Bangladesh Caucus, Founder and Chair
Congressional Caucus on India and Indian-Americans, former co-chair
Animal Protection Caucus
Congressional Arts Caucus
Congressional Historic Preservation Caucus
Congressional LGBT Equality Caucus
Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus
National Service Caucus
Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus
Crowley served as Democratic Caucus Chairman of the United States House of Representatives, the fourth-highest leadership position in the House Democratic Caucus. Crowley’s cousin, New York City firefighter John Moran, was killed as a result of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Crowley authored a bill that provided the 9/11 Heroes Medal of Valor to all emergency workers who died as a result of the terrorist acts. He also created the Urban Area Security Initiative, which directs money to prevent terrorism toward regions that are seen as the most threatened.
Joe Crowley has spent much time in India, created a Bangladesh caucus and was formerly the chair of the India Caucus. On October 10, 2002, Crowley was among the 81 House Democrats who voted in favor of authorizing the invasion of Iraq.
Joe Crowley joined Bronx Representative José E. Serrano in 2008 in proposing legislation to help clean up PCB-contaminated schools. In April 2011 Crowley received media attention for an angry “speech” he gave without actually speaking. Crowley ripped pieces of paper with words to deliver his message.
Joe Crowley Policy positions
Health care
Since 2005, Joe Crowley consistently received ratings of 100% from NARAL and 0% from the National Right to Life Committee. In 2011 he opposed a bill that would have banned taxpayer funding for abortions, and in the 2010 election, he was endorsed by Planned Parenthood.
In 2018 Crowley received a voting record of 100% from Planned Parenthood. Since 2007 he received a rating of 100% from the American Public Health Association, American Nurses Association, and the National Breast Cancer Coalition
Joe Crowley fought against the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) both abroad and in the United States. In 2010 he introduced the Girls Protection Act of 2010, which would criminalize the transport of a girl under the age of 18 years old to undergo FGM.
In 2015 he proposed a bill with Representative Sheila Jackson Lee encouraging the collection of data on the prevalence of FGM and create a plan to better prevent the practice, which is illegal in the United States. Joe Crowley was a consistent supporter of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (known as “Obamacare” or “ACA”).
On March 22, 2010, he said, “I… support the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a historic measure that will put families first when it comes to accessing health care coverage.” Joe Crowley opposed the repealing act and voted against a repeal on January 19, 2011.
Also in 2011, he held an event to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the bill’s passage. In 2017 Crowley signed on to H.R. 676, the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act. This bill was introduced by former Michigan Congressman John Conyers in January 2017.
Immigration
Joe Crowley is a heavy critic of President Trump’s plan to build a wall on the U.S.–Mexico border and his decision to end DACA and Temporary Protected Status protection for qualifying immigrants in 2017. In 2017 Crowley introduced a bill that would grant green cards to undocumented workers who helped to recover and clean up New York City after the terrorist attacks on September 11.
Economy and budget
Joe Crowley holds the view “that reducing barriers to investment, creating opportunities for small businesses, and providing equitable working conditions for all Americans can and should be part of our national economic policy” He supported federal spending as a way to increase economic growth.
In 2008 he endorsed the Financial Asset Purchase Authority and Tax Law Amendments, which established the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) and allowed the Secretary of the Treasury to buy assets from troubled financial institutions.
Joe Crowley advocated tax increases on the highest tax brackets, tax cuts for the middle class, and reduced defense spending. When serving on the Ways and Means Committee he stated, “I really don’t see how it’s justifiable or sensible to give a tax cut to the wealthiest among us, but at the same time increase taxes on U.S. soldiers.”
He also applauded the 2009 Budget for ending the Alternative Minimum Tax and ensuring tax cuts for 23 million middle-class Americans. In 2011 he opposed a bill that appropriated funds to the defense budget.
In 2017 Crowley opposed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, saying its only goal was to give more tax cuts to America’s top 1% than the working class. In December 2017 Crowley said in a floor speech, “It’s a scam and the American people know it. Is this a bill that helps people who are living paycheck to paycheck? Hell no.”
Joe Crowley for Congress
It was less than three weeks until Primary Day and, on first blush, the poll that Representative Joseph Crowley had been shown by his team of advisers was encouraging: He led his upstart rival, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, by 36 percentage points.
It was the last poll Mr. Crowley’s campaign would conduct. Despite his many reputed strengths — his financial might as one of the top fund-raisers in Congress, his supposed stranglehold on Queens politics as the party boss, his seeming deep roots in an area he had represented for decades — Mr. Crowley was unable to prevent his stunning and thorough defeat on Tuesday night.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez bested Mr. Crowley by 15 percentage points, delivering a victory expected to make her, at 28, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. If it takes a perfect storm to dislodge a congressional leader, then Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and her crusading campaign about class, race, gender, age, absenteeism, and ideology proved to be just that.
She and her supporters swept up Mr. Crowley in a redrawn and diversifying 14th Congressional District where the incumbent, despite two decades in Congress, had never run in a competitive primary.
She flipped the levers of power he was supposed to have — his status as a local party boss and his money — against him, using that as ammunition in an insurgent bid that cut down a possible successor to Nancy Pelosi and the No. 4 Democrat in the House.
No single factor led to Mr. Crowley’s defeat, more than a half-dozen officials inside and close to his campaign said in interviews, most on the condition of anonymity. It was demographics and generational change, insider versus outsider, traditional tactics versus modern-age digital organizing.
It was the cumulative weight of them all. The multiple and overlapping layers of the biggest victory yet by the emboldened left of the Democratic Party — Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a socialist — has complicated the calculation for party leaders scrambling to answer what, or who comes next.
Ms. Pelosi downplayed its significance on Capitol Hill on Wednesday; others signaled the alarm for change. “It’s a wake-up for everybody,” said Michael Blake, a vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a New York assemblyman who represents a nearby district in the Bronx.
Mr. Blake said Mr. Crowley, 56, ran into a charismatic younger challenger whose politics and profile — a woman with Puerto Rican roots — matched a diverse Queens and Bronx district, where 49 percent of residents are Hispanic and fewer than one in five are white.
“A lot of people of color were excited about a young woman of color,” Mr. Blake said. “People say demographics are destiny and you can’t ignore that reality when looking at the numbers there.” But Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, in an interview on Wednesday, dismissed race as a driving factor in her win, though she had regularly highlighted her heritage on the campaign trail.
“It would be a huge mistake to just say that this election happened because X demographics live here. That is to absolutely miss the entire point of what we just accomplished,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. A former organizer for Bernie Sanders, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez won across the district, carrying Mr. Crowley’s home borough of Queens by a larger margin than she won the Bronx.
“She won virtually everywhere,” said Steven Romalewski, a researcher at the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York Graduate Center, who mapped the results. She drew support for her progressive platform that included abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Medicare for all and a federal jobs guarantee.
Mr. Sanders had carried more than 41 percent of the vote in the district in the 2016 presidential primary. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I’m ‘Unapologetic About What I Believe’. The Bronx native spoke about her campaign’s mission a day after she shook up the Democratic Party with her defeat of Representative Joseph Crowley. Credit Annie Tritt for The New York Times.
“Her strongest support came from areas that were not predominantly Hispanic,” Mr. Romalewski said, citing Astoria, where white residents comprise nearly half the population. To prepare for the race, Mr. Crowley’s campaign commissioned its first poll early in 2018; the results showed him far ahead.
But the poll also had some worrisome numbers: Joe Crowley was remarkably little known back home, despite his many years in office, and his favorability rating was also low, according to people familiar with the findings. Mr. Crowley’s family lives in the Washington area — a fact Ms. Ocasio-Cortez used as a cudgel.
And the district itself had been redrawn following the 2010 census. This year was Mr. Crowley’s first primary since then. By early June, the Crowley campaign was already on high alert. He had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on mailers and voter outreach, but Mr. Crowley remained mired in the low 50s in the head-to-head matchup — a danger zone for any incumbent.
His bank account showed $1 million for the race’s final sprint. But Federal Election Commission records reveal that nearly two-thirds of those funds were earmarked for the general election. He couldn’t spend it on the primary.
In a pre-election interview, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said Mr. Crowley’s blitz of activity and mail — one official involved in his campaign said some voters received more than a dozen pieces of literature — had redounded to her benefit.“It’s funny,” she said.
“A lot of people find our campaign because he comes out for the first time and they’re like ‘Who’s this? And who’s running against him?’” At the end of May, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez released a two-minute biographical video that went viral, the latest instance of this “girl from the Bronx,” as she called herself, catching fire on social media.
Her video and a competing three-minute clip that Mr. Crowley released days before the election told the story of the race. Mr. Crowley fawned over his district’s diversity and pitched himself as an ally. “The one thing about my life experience,” he said in the opening, “is the ability to put myself in other people’s shoes.”
She pitched herself as a member of the community itself. His video had fewer than 90,000 views on Twitter by Primary Day. Hers had more than 500,000. There were some frustrations with Mr. Crowley and the Queens machine’s approach against Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s more nimble social media presence.
“We had people running this like a 1998 City Council race and not a 2018 congressional primary,” said one person involved in Mr. Crowley’s campaign, granted anonymity to speak about its shortcomings. By Tuesday, some members of Mr. Crowley’s team could feel the movement even before the polls closed.
They saw heavier turnout in some more gentrified pockets of the district — Sanders-type strongholds. Her social media presence was swamping them. Daniel Dromm, a Democratic city councilman who represents part of the congressional district, said he warned the Queens County Democratic leaders, including Mr. Crowley himself, that the district was shifting beneath them, ideologically and racially.
“They didn’t want to hear this,” Mr. Dromm recalled the response. Still, few expected Mr. Crowley would be felled, as his family and staff filed into his headquarters on Tuesday evening.
Two officials in the Joe Crowley camp said turnout had been only slightly higher than expected. Either she had turned out different voters, or they voted the other way. It was too early to tell. The result was the same. People were crying. Mr. Crowley was consoling them. “I’m sorry,” he apologized to some.
Joe Crowley Quotes
Some of the FDA’s own scientists have charged that politics, not science, is behind the FDA’s actions.
We are not a monolithic group of individuals, not every single person believes the exact same thing.
The role at the DCCC as well as the role of chief deputy whip – I wouldn’t be where I am in those spots if it were not for the speaker’s approval.
I believe that the United States has a moral obligation to stand up for those citizens of the world who cannot stand up for themselves, and I am proud to have authored the bill signed into law today that continues to put significant pressure on the brutal Burmese military junta.
The American people and American businesses are looking to the federal government to lead our nation on the path to economic recovery. It is time to stop splitting hairs. It is time to act.
Joe Crowley Political campaigns
Joe Crowley was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1998. The seat was considered open after incumbent Thomas J. Manton retired. Crowley was reelected without any significant opposition in the next nine elections since his seat was safely Democratic.
In 2006 through 2016 elections, he did not face any primary challengers. On June 26, 2018, Democratic primary for New York’s 14th congressional district, Crowley was defeated by challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who received 57% of the vote.
Joe Crowley remained on the general election ballot under the Working Families Party line. Ocasio-Cortez called on Crowley to take his name off the ballot, but he responded that he could not unless he moved, died, was convicted of a felony, or filed to run for another office in November as a paper candidate (which he claimed would be a form of electoral fraud).
Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joe Crowley and Republican Anthony Pappas in the November 6 general election, with Crowley receiving about 7% of the vote.
Joe Crowley post-political career
In February 2019 Crowley resigned as Chair of the Queens Democratic Party and signed on to the lobbying firm Squire Patton Boggs. June Bunch was selected to serve as Chair on an interim basis.
Crowley also became an honorary co-chair of the Pass USMCA Coalition, an umbrella organization working to pass USMCA, the Trump administration’s replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement.
In May 2019 Crowley joined the board of Northern Swan Holdings Inc., an investment firm focused on hemp and marijuana cultivation in Colombia, along with former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.
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