The week of St. Patrick’s Day has always been a defining one for former Rep. Joseph Crowley, who was a top-ranking Democrat in the House until his surprising 2018 primary loss to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a district covering parts of Queens and the Bronx in New York.
During his 20 years in Congress, the longtime leader of New York’s Irish political base would celebrate his birthday on March 16, then join the Irish taoiseach, or head of the nation’s government, for St. Patrick’s Day ceremonies at the White House and a celebratory luncheon with the House speaker on Capitol Hill.
“For someone like myself, who was steeped in Irish culture and history and music and poetry, that was just a very special day on the Hill, that a country so small could have had such an impact on the creation of our country,” Crowley said, noting that nearly half the U.S. presidents, including John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden, had Irish roots.
This year will be similar for Crowley, but without the visit to the White House. After his 64th birthday on Monday, Crowley said he planned to attend a number of St. Patrick’s Day events including at the Irish ambassador’s residence, give a lecture on Irish involvement in the American Revolution, join fundraisers for Democratic candidates and, of course, have an occasional Guinness.
Crowley’s Irish heritage started with four grandparents from Northern Ireland and a mother who immigrated to New York and married Joe Crowley Sr., who had a career as a detective in the New York City Police Department. He also had an uncle on the City Council whose namesake is the Crowley Playground in Queens.
After graduating from Queens College in 1985 with a degree in political science and communications, Crowley was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1986 and served until 1998, when another son of Irish immigrants, Democratic Rep. Thomas J. Manton, announced his retirement from Congress and tapped Crowley to be his successor.
Throughout his political career, Crowley was deeply involved in Irish issues at the local level in Queens, in the state legislature and in Congress, where he served on the Foreign Affairs, Financial Services and Ways and Means committees.
“I think when we came to the Hill, I was always grateful to have the opportunity to work on the peace process” in Ireland, he said. “To be able to engage on that, to work with all parties in the north to try to further the peace within the province of Ulster, that was something that was very personal to me. … It gave me an opportunity to have a deeper breadth of understanding of ‘the Troubles’ themselves.”
Among other top accomplishments, Crowley cites his work to help pass the financial regulatory law known as the Dodd-Frank Act following the 2008 financial crisis and the health care overhaul known as the Affordable Care Act in 2010. By 2017 he had risen to chair of the House Democratic Caucus and was considered a possible successor to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Then came the sudden rise of Ocasio-Cortez, a bartender and waitress in the Bronx who had worked on the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and decided to challenge Crowley with a campaign that labeled the incumbent as not progressive enough for his district. She won the June 2018 primary with 57 percent of the vote and raced to victory in the November election, becoming the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, at age 29.
Crowley, who joined the law and lobbying firm of Squire Patton Boggs in Washington in 2019 and then rival firm Dentons as a senior policy director in its regulatory, public policy and government affairs practice in 2022, said he’s not had much interaction with Ocasio-Cortez. “I’ve run into her a couple of times on the Hill, but there’s no real communication between us,” he said. “She’s operating in her own manner, and that’s fine. There are no hard feelings from my end.”
Crowley said he does miss being involved in the fray on Capitol Hill, sometimes wondering what kind of impact he could have made if he were still a member of Congress.
On the other hand, being out of office for the past seven years did allow time for Crowley to be more involved in two major events — one a joyous triumph and the other a family tragedy.
He helped produce a Broadway musical in 2022, “Paradise Square,” about conflicts between Irish Americans and Black Americans in New York City during the Civil War.
That same year his oldest son, Cullen, graduated from the Naval Academy and was headed for the Marine Corps when he was diagnosed with a rare and incurable form of cancer, a desmoplastic small round cell tumor.
“That led to three years of quite a bit of suffering for Cullen personally and for all of us emotionally,” Crowley said. “He was buried at Arlington Cemetery in July of last year. So we’re still going through the struggles with that, but I wouldn’t have been able to give him the comfort and the things that we could do for him and for all of my family if I were still in the House. I think that that was a big difference.”
Now Crowley is focused on helping Democrats in the midterm elections and is optimistic about the party’s chances of winning control of the House and possibly the Senate.
“I think most Americans don’t view what the White House is doing as being positive for America when it comes to immigration and how they’re handling it,” he said. “I think people are just tired of the constant chaos that this White House has brought about economically and certainly now with this war [in Iran].”
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