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Elijah E. Cummings, Powerful Democrat Who Investigated Trump, Dies at 68 Elijah Cummings, Powerful Democrat Who Investigated Trump, Dies at 68
(about 4 hours later)
WASHINGTON — Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a son of sharecroppers who rose to become one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress and a central figure in the impeachment investigation of President Trump, died on Thursday in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He was 68. WASHINGTON — Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a son of sharecroppers who rose to become one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress and a central figure in the impeachment investigation of President Trump, died on Thursday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He was 68.
His death was confirmed by a spokeswoman, Trudy Perkins, in a statement that said he died of “complications concerning longstanding health challenges.” No other details were given. Mr. Cummings had been ailing in recent years and used a motorized wheelchair. His death was confirmed by his wife, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, the Maryland State Democratic chairwoman. A spokeswoman, Trudy Perkins, said in a statement that Mr. Cummings died of “complications concerning longstanding health challenges.” No other details were given.
Mr. Cummings, who was in his 13th term serving as a representative for Maryland, was chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, a position that gave him sweeping power to investigate Mr. Trump and his administration — and he used it. Mr. Cummings, who was serving his 13th term representing Maryland, had been in poor health. In recent years he had begun making his way around the Capitol in a motorized scooter and using a walker to steady himself. In 2017, he was in the hospital for two months after complications of a heart valve replacement — convinced, he told The New York Times in May, that he was “living on borrowed time.”
A critical ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Mr. Cummings spent his final months in Congress sparring with the president, calling Mr. Trump’s effort to block congressional lines of inquiry “far worse than Watergate.” With a booming voice and speaking cadence that hinted of the pulpit — his parents were preachers — Mr. Cummings was a compelling figure on Capitol Hill. For more than two decades, he represented a section of Baltimore with more than its share of social problems. He campaigned tirelessly for stricter gun control laws and help for those addicted to drugs.
He was sued by Mr. Trump as the president tried to keep his business records secret. But it was as chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform — the panel charged with maintaining integrity in government — that Mr. Cummings may have left his most lasting legacy. The position gave him sweeping power to investigate Mr. Trump and his administration — and he used it.
With his booming voice and a speaking cadence with hints of the pulpit — his parents eventually became preachers — Mr. Cummings was a compelling figure on Capitol Hill. For more than two decades, he represented a section of Baltimore with more than its share of social problems. He campaigned tirelessly for stricter gun control laws and help for those addicted to drugs. He sparred with Mr. Trump in the most public of ways. In February, he summoned the president’s former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, to testify about hush money payments to women who claimed to have had an affair with Mr. Trump; Mr. Cohen denounced Mr. Trump as a “racist” and a “con man.” And he issued subpoenas for Mr. Trump’s financial records; Mr. Trump responded by suing him, prompting him to call the president’s effort to block congressional inquiries “far worse than Watergate.”
He grabbed the national spotlight in 2015 when he took to the streets of Baltimore, bullhorn in hand, and pleaded for calm after riots erupted in his neighborhood after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a young black man who died in police custody. Hours earlier, Mr. Cummings had delivered Mr. Gray’s eulogy. In an interview with The Times in May, Mr. Cummings was asked what message he would like to send to the president.
When the president assailed Mr. Cummings’s beloved Baltimore — a city whose population is two-thirds African-American — as “a disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess” and “the worst run and most dangerous” city in the United States, the congressman vociferously defended his hometown. “I want to send a message that we have one life to live, Mr. President,” he replied. “This is no dress rehearsal. And that the American people simply want to live their lives without fear of their leaders. And we, as leaders, have a duty and a responsibility to keep our promise to them when we ran for office — and that is to make their lives better. While we’re all on this earth, that’s my message.”
President Trump on Thursday tweeted his “warmest condolences” to Mr. Cummings’s family and friends and praised him for his “strength, passion and wisdom.” Even as his health kept him away from Washington in recent months, Mr. Cummings, a close ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, remained involved in the impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump. Those close to him said that he joined strategy calls with Ms. Pelosi and other chairmen, and signed subpoenas from his hospital bed.
Mr. Cummings said that while it was his “constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the executive branch,” it was his “moral duty” to fight for his constituents. “In the House, Elijah was our North Star,” Ms. Pelosi said in a statement. “He was a leader of towering character and integrity, whose stirring voice and steadfast values pushed the Congress and country to rise always to a higher purpose.”
He took on both tasks with passion. He used his powerful perch on Capitol Hill to target Mr. Trump in the most public of ways. In February of this year, Mr. Cummings summoned Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, to testify before his committee for an extraordinary hearing in which Mr. Cohen denounced the president as “a con man” and a “cheat.” Mr. Trump, in turn, hurled insults at Mr. Cummings, calling him “racist” and “a brutal bully” who had done “a very poor job” representing his constituents in Baltimore, which the president declared a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”
The most arresting moment came from the congressman’s plaintive closing statement. “We have got to get back to normal!” Mr. Cummings thundered from the dais, in a moment that quickly went viral. But on Thursday, in a rare show of politeness toward his political foe, Mr. Trump offered his condolences to Mr. Cummings’s family and praised the congressman on Twitter. “My warmest condolences to the family and many friends of Congressman Elijah Cummings,” he wrote. “I got to see first hand the strength, passion and wisdom of this highly respected political leader. His work and voice on so many fronts will be very hard, if not impossible, to replace!”
He had been absent from Capitol Hill in recent weeks because of his illness. But before that, he could often be found in the Speaker’s Lobby — the ornate antechamber off the House floor, decorated with portraits of past House speakers — fielding reporters' questions or quietly reading. In the Capitol, where flags were lowered to half-staff in Mr. Cummings’s memory, Democrats and Republicans alike praised him for his social conscience and dogged determination.
As Washington awoke to news of Mr. Cummings’s death on Thursday, lawmakers mourned the loss of a congressman they called a lion of the institution and a treasured representative of his constituents. Even Trey Gowdy, the Republican former congressman from South Carolina who fought bitterly with Mr. Cummings during the 2012 hearings into the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, said on Twitter that “Elijah Cummings was one of the most powerful, beautiful & compelling voices in American politics.”
“He spoke truth to power, defended the disenfranchised and represented West Baltimore with strength and dignity,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the chairman of the Democratic caucus, wrote on Twitter. “Congress has lost a Champion. Heaven has gained an Angel of Justice. May he forever #RestInPower.” He added: “The power and the beauty came from his authenticity, his conviction, the sincerity with which he held his beliefs. We rarely agreed on political matters.”
Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, who served with Mr. Cummings in the House, said his death left an “irreplaceable void.” Mr. Cummings prided himself on his slow, methodical manner, but he could also work himself into a fiery oration, when his brow would furrow deeply and his voice would quiver with emotion.
“Quite possibly no elected official mattered so much to his constituents,” Mr. Cardin said in a statement. “Chairman Cummings guaranteed a voice to so many who would otherwise not have one, and stood as a symbol for the heights one could reach if they paid no mind to obstacles, naysayers and hate.” When Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, testified before the committee investigating Benghazi, Mr. Cummings, the panel’s top Democrat, flew in as she withstood hours of withering questions from Republicans. “Do we want to badger you until we get the ‘gotcha’ moment?” he cried. “We’re better than that.”
Mr. Cummings prided himself on his slow, methodical manner, but he could also work himself into a fiery oration, when his brow would furrow deeply and his voice would quiver with emotion. When Mr. Trump sued him in April to keep his business records secret, Mr. Cummings urged Congress to move slowly on impeachment. But the following month, with the White House raising a full-scale blockade of Democrats’ access to documents and witnesses, Mr. Cummings sounded impatient in an interview. When Mr. Cohen testified before him in February, the most arresting moment came not from the witness but from the congressman himself. “We have got to get back to normal!” Mr. Cummings thundered from the dais in an impassioned closing statement that quickly went viral.
“It sounds like he’s asking us to impeach him,” the congressman said then, calling the White House blockade “a constitutional crisis” that was “far worse than Watergate.” Elijah Eugene Cummings was born on Jan. 18, 1951, in Baltimore and grew up there. His parents, Robert and Ruth Cummings, were sharecroppers from South Carolina who had moved north to improve prospects for themselves and their children.
Mr. Cummings was also an ardent defender of Hillary Clinton as the top Democrat during the grueling hearings held by the committee that investigated the 2012 terrorist attack on two government facilities in Benghazi, Libya. His antagonistic exchanges with the chairman of that panel, former Representative Trey Gowdy, once grew so heated that The Daily Beast proclaimed the two men had gone “ballistic.” Mr. Cummings often spoke of his mother, who he said had “only a fourth grade education,” and whose humble past had a profound influence on him.
Mr. Cummings had a series of health challenges in recent years, and had begun making his way around the Capitol in his motorized scooter and using a walker to steady himself. In 2017, he was in the hospital for two months after complications from a heart valve replacement, convinced, he said, that he was “living on borrowed time.” He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Howard University in Washington, where he was student government president, with a degree in political science. He earned a law degree from the University of Maryland and was a practicing lawyer while serving for 14 years in the Maryland House of Delegates, where he was the first African-American in the state’s history to be named speaker pro tem.
But he was spiritual in his approach to his illness, and his life. He told the story of how one day, when he was in such dire pain that he thought he might faint, a hospital worker turned up at his bedside, saying the Lord had sent her to deliver a message: “I’m just trying to get your attention. I’m not done with you.”As his health deteriorated, Mr. Cummings’s wife, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, ended her bid for governor. In a statement on Thursday, she called her late husband “a dynamic figure in American politics.” He was eyeing a seat in the Maryland Senate, where Democrats were in the minority, when he ran in a special election in 1996 to fill the seat vacated by Kweisi Mfume, who resigned to become president of the N.A.A.C.P. He beat more than two dozen other Democrats in a crowded primary, which in heavily Democratic Baltimore is tantamount to winning the general election, and never had a serious challenge after that.
“He worked until his last breath because he believed our democracy was the highest and best expression of our collective humanity and that our nation’s diversity was our promise, not our problem,” said Ms. Cummings, who chairs the Maryland Democratic Party. In Washington, Mr. Cummings became active in the Congressional Black Caucus, of which he was chairman.
Although he was a fierce defender of his party and its interests, Mr. Cummings had strong friendships with members of the other party. Republicans generally held him in high regard, and he had an especially improbable bond with Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina and a leader of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus. Gun control was a political as well as a personal issue for Mr. Cummings. In June 2011, his nephew Christopher Cummings was shot to death in Virginia, where he was a college student.
“Just hearing about the death of Rep. Elijah Cummings and my heart is broken,” Mia Love, a former Republican congresswoman of Utah, wrote on Twitter. “Just broken. I had the honor and privilege of serving with this strong man in Congress.” In 2015, as the city — and his own West Baltimore neighborhood — erupted into riots after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a young black man who had died in police custody, Mr. Cummings took to the streets, bullhorn in hand, to plead for calm. Hours earlier, ever the preachers’ son, he had delivered Mr. Gray’s eulogy.
Mr. Cummings was revered in Baltimore, where he came up as a lawyer and later a state legislator. A tall, broad-shouldered man with an expressive face, Mr. Cummings had served in Congress since winning a special election in 1996 to fill the seat vacated by Kweisi Mfume, who resigned to become president of the N.A.A.C.P. Mr. Cummings’s Seventh District includes most of West Baltimore and suburbs west of the city, as well as Howard County. “Did you see him?!” Mr. Cummings roared, his voice rising in anger as he implored the congregation to confront the invisibility of young black men. “Did you see him? Did you see him?” The congregation roared back with applause.
Since his initial victory in 1996, Mr. Cummings had not been seriously challenged in either a primary or general election, according to The Almanac of American Politics. In 2003 and 2004, he was chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. He was an early supporter of Barack Obama for president and was co-chairman of Mr. Obama’s campaign in Maryland in 2008. In 2016, after a Justice Department investigation found that the Baltimore Police Department had routinely harassed members of minority groups, Mr. Cummings said the report “should infuriate us all.”
Elijah Eugene Cummings, the son of sharecroppers from South Carolina who moved north to improve prospects for themselves and their children, who would eventually number seven, was born in Baltimore on Jan. 18, 1951, and grew up in the city. Mr. Cummings rose through the ranks of the Oversight Committee to become its top Democrat. In 2017 he ascended to the chairmanship, a role that gave him wide latitude.
He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Howard University in Washington, where he was student government president, with a degree in political science. He earned a law degree from the University of Maryland and was a practicing attorney while serving for 14 years in the Maryland House of Delegates, where he was the first African-American in the state’s history to be named speaker pro tem. He used his authority broadly, investigating everything from whether Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, was truthful in explaining why he had added a citizenship question to the 2020 census to policy matters, like military suicides and the high cost of prescription drugs. (Ms. Pelosi has appointed Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York as the acting chairwoman.)
Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting. The relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cummings got off to a rocky start. In an April 2017 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Trump recounted their first meeting, “Elijah Cumming was in my office and he said, ‘You will go down as one of the great presidents in the history of our country.’”
The congressman promptly issued a statement saying he had been misquoted.
“During my meeting with the president and on several occasions since then, I have said repeatedly that he could be a great president if — if — he takes steps to truly represent all Americans rather than continuing on the divisive and harmful path he is currently on,” the statement said.
That year Mr. Cummings became ill, prompting his wife to abandon a bid for governor.
“He worked until his last breath,” she said in a statement on Thursday, “because he believed our democracy was the highest and best expression of our collective humanity and that our nation’s diversity was our promise, not our problem.”
Complete information on Mr. Cummings’s survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Cummings was spiritual in his approach to his illness, and his life. In the interview in May, he told the story of how one day, when was in such dire pain that he thought he might faint, a hospital worker turned up at his bedside, saying the Lord had sent her to deliver a message: “I’m just trying to get your attention. I’m not done with you.”