Elizabeth Holtzman (born August 11, 1941) is an American lawyer and former Democratic politician, pioneer woman officeholder, four term U.S. Representative (youngest woman), two term District Attorney of Kings County (Brooklyn) (first woman), and New York City Comptroller (first woman.)
Her role on the House Judiciary committee during the Watergate scandal drew national attention.
She was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of attorney Sidney Holtzman and Filia Holtzman (a college professor). She is a graduate of Brooklyn's Abraham Lincoln High School (1958), Radcliffe College (magna cum laude 1962), and Harvard Law School (1965). She was admitted to the bar in New York State (1966).
In the 1972 primary election, she upset Judiciary Committee chairman Emanuel Celler, the fifty-year incumbent and the House's longest serving member at that time. Celler was 53 years older than Holtzman and had already been serving in the House for 18 years when Holtzman was born.
She served on the House Judiciary Committee. In the summer of 1974 it held impeachment hearings on President Richard Nixon's activities.
She was a member of the House Budget Committee and Chairwoman of the House Immigration Subcommittee.
In 1978 she secured an extension of the deadline for state legislatures to ratify the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution. (House Joint Resolution No. 638 was approved by the 95th Congress.)
Rep. Holtzman helped pass legislation in 1978 to expel more Nazi war criminals who had immigrated to the United States. It established the U.S. DOJ Office of Special Investigations within the United States Department of Justice Criminal Division to investigate and bring legal action to denaturalize or deport them. The Immigration and Naturalization Service had kept a list of suspects but had not pursued them.
Holtzman was the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1980. In her party's primary she defeated former Miss America Bess Myerson, former New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay, and Queens District Attorney John Santucci. Myerson had been the initial favorite, with endorsements from Mayor of New York Ed Koch, Governor of New York Hugh Carey and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
She ran against Republican challenger Al D'Amato and incumbent Senator Jacob Javits. Despite his loss in the Republican primary, Javits ran in the general election on the Liberal Party ticket. He retained his union endorsements and drew liberal and Jewish voters away from Holtzman. A theme of D'Amato's campaign was that Holtzman had never voted for a Department of Defense appropriation bill in Congress.
In 1981, Holtzman made a comeback, winning election as District Attorney in Kings County (Brooklyn), a post to which she was reelected in 1985. While district attorney, she formed new bureaus to focus on sex crimes and domestic violence, along with children's issues. She argued ... and won ... New York v. Burger, , a case in which the United States Supreme Court held that warrantless administrative inspections can support criminal convictions in "closely regulated" industries.
She won citywide office when she was elected New York City Comptroller in 1989. She has said that she first considered a race for Mayor of New York in 1989 before deciding to seek the comptroller's post instead. Holtzman viewed the comptroller's post as an extension of her work in Congress and as district attorney.
In 1992, after the Clarence Thomas Anita Hill controversy, Holtzman sought the Democratic nomination for Senator to challenge Republican D'Amato again.
The Democrats seeking the nomination (Holtzman, Geraldine Ferraro, New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams, Representative Robert J. Mrazek and Rev. Al Sharpton) split the feminists. Emily's List endorsed Ferraro, and raised money for her. Much of the leadership of National Organization for Women was in Holtzman's camp. Former Democratic Party National Organizer Anne F. Lewis had suggested women split their campaign donations between the two women. Betty Friedan endorsed Holtzman.
She lost a bitter primary, with rancorous debates. Both Abrams and Holtzman exploited Ferraro's tax problems, and the legal problems of her husband and son, even suggesting a Mafia connection to the family. Holtzman was vulnerable for an August loan to her campaign from Fleet Bank. In August 1992 Holtzman borrowed $450,000 to pay for television ads against Ferraro. (These charges came back to haunt her in her unsuccessful 1993 bid for a second term as Comptroller, although she was later cleared of all charges. Democrats blamed her for the expensive and brutal Senate primary that left nominee Abrams too weakened to defeat vulnerable incumbent D'Amato.)
She finished with 13%, last behind New York Attorney General Robert Abrams, former Representative and 1984 vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, and Al Sharpton.
Holtzman did not endorse Abrams, her party's candidate in the general election. Nor did Ferraro.
Senator D'Amato, the Republican incumbent, won re-election in November 49% to 48%.
During Holtzman's 1993 reelection race for city comptroller, she faced Assemblyman Alan Hevesi and former Congressman Herman Badillo in the Democratic primary. Badillo was also the Republican nominee for comptroller on a fusion ticket with mayoral nominee Rudolph Giuliani.Ferraro, upset over Holtzman's ethics accusation from the 1992 Senate primary, encouraged Hevesi to oppose Holtzman. (Hevesi and Ferraro would later become estranged.) Service Employees International Union Local 1199 (a politically powerful health care union led by Jennifer Cunningham), endorsed Hevesi. While initial polls showed Holtzman an easy winner for reelection, the Fleet Bank loan from the Senate race was made an issue by Hevesi and Badillo during the NY1 debate and led to Holtzman losing support.
Holtzman's office in March 1993 included a Fleet entity on a list of recommended underwriters for the city's municipal bond sales. Her campaign still owed Fleet $255,000 on loan from the 1992 campaign, and had missed two payment deadlines.
In the primary, Holtzman finished second and was forced into a runoff with Hevesi. Hevesi crushed Holtzman in the runoff primary election, 67% - 33% and went on to defeat Badillo in the general election.
Her last term in elective office ended in 1994. Since then she has been an attorney in private practice. She is now an attorney and author on politics. For nearly ten years, ending in 2007, she served on a Congressionally mandated commission, the IWG, charged with producing a report recommending for declassification U.S. records relating to Nazi and Japanese Imperial Government war crimes. Since 2006, as a book author and blogger, she has advocated the impeachment of President George W. Bush.
Holtzman entered the private practice of law in New York City.
She published a memoir in 1996, Who said it would be easy: one woman's life in the political arena (Cynthia L. Cooper, coauthor).
Miss Holtzman was a public member of the long running Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), a commission established by a 1998 act of Congress to locate, identify, inventory, and recommend for declassification, currently classified U.S. records relating to Nazi and Imperial Japanese war crimes. Along with other public members, she had some sharp and public disagreements with the Central Intelligence Agency's interpretation of the law. On 2007-09-28, the Archivist of the United States presented to Congress, the Administration, and the American people the final report of the IWG.
On January 11, 2006, The Nation published her essay calling for the impeachment of U.S. President George W. Bush for authorizing"the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act." She expanded on her arguments for impeaching President Bush in a 2006 book coauthored with Cynthia L. Cooper, The impeachment of George W. Bush: a practical guide for concerned citizens.In June 2008, Holtzman published a commentary on the action of U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) in introducing articles of impeachment against President Bush on June 9, 2008.
She was weighing a bid for New York State Attorney General in the 2010 election, but announced on May 25, 2010, that she had decided not to run.
