Elizabeth Holtzman Runs for Congress in the New NY-10

Elizabeth Holtzman (photo: Liz Holtzman for Congress)

Former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, the first and only woman ever elected Brooklyn District Attorney and New York City Comptroller, has ended her decades-long hiatus from political campaigns to run for Congress in the crowded field for the new 10th district.

“I said to myself, ‘I’m not a sidelines person — this country is in danger,” Holtzman said about why she joined the race during a recent appearance on the Max Politics podcast from Gotham Gazette. “And I have the background, the skills, the know-how, the guts to take these dangers on and try to defeat them.” 

Holtzman, who was at 31 the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at the time when she first won in 1972, is campaigning alongside roughly a dozen candidates to represent a diverse set of neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The new 10th district, which has no incumbent running, includes the East and West Villages, Soho and Noho, the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Battery Park City, the Financial District, parts of Downtown Brooklyn, Gowanus, Park Slope, Red Hook, Sunset Park, Borough Park, and more.

It is among the congressional and state senate primaries that will conclude on August 23, with early voting preceding from August 13-21, as well as absentee balloting.

Holtzman represented parts of Brooklyn in Congress from 1973-1981, then won her race to become Brooklyn District Attorney, followed by Comptroller. She narrowly lost her 1992 bid to become New York’s first female U.S. Senator.

When asked by Gotham Gazette editor Ben Max about why she decided to run for Congress, Holtzman, who said she lives in the geographic center of the new 10th district, said the conservative majority of the Supreme Court is “trying to take our rights away,” former President Donald Trump is likely to run another campaign based on “fraud and deceit,” and “MAGA” Republicans are threatening the economy, climate, and more

Holtzman emphasized that she differentiates herself from the other contenders in having the background and courage to take them on.

Holtzman cited her experience as a member of Congress in the ‘70s, in which she helped pass a plethora of legislation and was one of the first members on the House Judiciary Committee to call for the impeachment of then-President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.

“If we were in normal times, I wouldn’t be running for Congress now, I’d be on some kind of vacation,” Holtzman said. “But the fact of the matter is, I don’t want to look at myself in the mirror as we go downhill towards authoritarianism and worse, and say to myself ‘I did nothing about it.’”

Asked if there are lessons that the country learned during the Nixon era that have been forgotten today, Holtzman said that both Nixon and Trump were “out of control,” but noted that the U.S. Department of Justice through a special prosecutor investigated Nixon while there has been no such investigation of Trump beyond the Mueller report and now the special committee on the insurrection of January 6, 2021.

Holtzman said she is frustrated by the lack of action based on the evidence.

“The…