Nita M. Lowey, who represented a congressional district based in Westchester County for 32 years, ardently supporting liberal causes and playing a key role in shaping legislation to advance them, died on Saturday at her home in Harrison, N.Y. She was 87.
Her death was announced by her family, which said she had metastatic breast cancer.
A Democrat who charmed her constituents and fellow politicians with a warm, grandmotherly image — she was 51 when she was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1988 — Ms. Lowey was also a savvy negotiator on the House Appropriations Committee, the powerful body influential in enacting government spending laws.
She served on the committee for nearly all of her time in Washington and rose to be the first woman to lead it. Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who was House speaker when Ms. Lowey steered the committee and with whom Ms. Lowey was closely allied, called Ms. Lowey a “master legislator” who “is both gracious and tenacious” and seeks “to find common ground where she can and stands her ground where she can’t.”
Representative Henry J. Hyde, an Illinois House Republican who tangled with Ms. Lowey, cautioned colleagues not to be misled by her kindly demeanor.
“She can make you smile while you’re bleeding,” Mr. Hyde said. “We call that the perfumed ice pick.”
Throughout her House tenure, Ms. Lowey sponsored or helped mold legislation with the aim of advancing, or at least protecting, leading causes atop the liberal agenda. They included women’s rights to abortions and health services, greater federal funding for homeless programs and low-cost housing, and child care and early education programs.
She voted against a bill in 1999 that would make it a federal crime for an adult to take a minor to another state for an abortion to avoid a parental notification law in the girl’s home state. “This bill could throw grandmothers in jail for helping their granddaughters,” she said.
She opposed the policy of two Republican presidents, George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, that banned federal aid to organizations worldwide that provided abortions or information about them, calling the policy a “cruel and unprecedented attack on the world’s most vulnerable women.”
She decried sexual harassment and in 1991 was one of a group of female House members who marched to the Senate side of the Capitol to demand that the Senate Judiciary Committee hear Anita Hill’s accusations against Clarence Thomas in his Supreme Court nomination hearing. The Senate later confirmed him for the seat.
Ms. Lowey was equally dogged on issues important to the New York region. Besides its large swath of Westchester, her district also included part of adjacent Rockland County and the Bronx and Queens.
Ms. Lowey pushed adamantly during negotiations with the Bush administration to keep it from watering down the president’s promise of $20 billion to help New York City recover after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
She pressed federal regulators to begin shutting down the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester. “No amount of energy capacity could outweigh the risk that a poorly managed nuclear facility poses to our region,” Ms. Lowey told The Times in 2008. She also fought a Republican-proposed revision of the Clean Water Act that she argued would hinder the cleanup of Long Island Sound.
During the first Trump administration, Ms. Lowey said she would resist his “misplaced priorities,” including building a wall on the Mexican border while cutting domestic spending “critical to hardworking American families.”
Over the course of her congressional career, Ms. Lowey occasionally upset her fellow liberals. She voted early in her tenure for a crime bill that included capital punishment for some offenses, though she opposed the death penalty. Crime was peaking amid rampant crack cocaine use, and she said that she had voted for the bill “because I think it’s so important that we take a strong position on getting crime off our streets.”
Ms. Lowey, who was a strong supporter of Israel, voted against the 2015 deal that her fellow Democrat, President Barack Obama, reached with Iran to curb its nuclear weapons program. “In my judgment,” she said, “sufficient safeguards are not in place to address the risks associated with the agreement,” which had been joined by several other countries.
After Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York announced his retirement, Ms. Lowey announced in 1999 that she would run for his seat only if Hillary Rodham Clinton, then said to be considering a candidacy, chose not to run. Mrs. Clinton did run, and went on to win the seat.
Nita Sue Melnikoff was born in the Bronx on July 5, 1937, to Jack and Beatrice Melnikoff. Her father was an accountant, and her mother was a homemaker active in civic and charitable groups.
After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science and, in 1959, Mount Holyoke College, Ms. Lowey worked in advertising for two years before marrying Stephen Lowey, a lawyer, with whom she raised two daughters and a son in Queens and then in Harrison.
Besides her husband of 64 years, she is survived by their children Dana Lowey Luttway, Jackie Lowey and Douglas Lowey, and eight grandchildren.
From 1975 to 1988 Ms. Lowey worked in the New York secretary of state’s office on economic development and neighborhood preservation. She was also active with politically oriented women’s groups, and in 1988 ran for a Westchester congressional seat against the two-term Republican incumbent, Joseph J. DioGuardi.
She defeated two Democratic primary opponents, Dennis Mehiel, a business owner, and Hamilton Fish V, whose father at the time represented an adjacent congressional district.
Ms. Lowey then campaigned on the theme that Mr. DioGuardi was a “cheerleader” for the conservative Republican administration of President Ronald Reagan and “has not stood up for our priorities,” such as providing sufficient funds for housing and homeless programs in Westchester. Mr. DioGuardi said she was distorting his record. She won 53 percent of the vote.
In her re-election races Ms. Lowey never had a Democratic primary opponent, and she won the general elections by substantial or overwhelming margins. She had no opponent at all in 2016.
She announced in October 2019 that she would not run for another term, saying that after three decades she had “decided the time was right” to leave the House. She said a suggestion that a possible primary challenge that year had factored into her decision was “ridiculous.” She was succeeded in office by Mondaire Jones, a fellow Democrat.
Her proudest achievement, she said, had been “breaking the glass ceiling for women” by becoming the first to lead the Appropriations Committee.
