Elizabeth Holtzman on her groundbreaking career and the ‘horror’ of the new Trump era

Elizabeth Holtzman may forever be known as the “toothpick who toppled the Washington Monument.” Holtzman’s political career kicked off in 1972 when she defeated 25-term Rep. Emanuel Celler to capture a Brooklyn seat in Congress. Holtzman, who for 42 years had the distinction of being the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, was thrust into the national spotlight as part of the House Judiciary Committee that investigated Watergate and was prepared to impeach President Richard Nixon. As a Judiciary Committee member, Holtzman would question President Gerald Ford on whether his pardon of Nixon was part of a deal to elevate Ford to the White House. In 1980, Holtzman narrowly lost a race for the U.S. Senate and then turned her attention to city office. She served as the Brooklyn district attorney in the 1980s – the first woman to serve as a district attorney in New York City – and in the 1990s, as New York City comptroller – the first woman to hold that office too. Now at the law firm Herrick Feinstein, she is a national expert on impeachment and presidential ethics. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your career has spanned a lot of different types of work: as a mayoral adviser, member of Congress, district attorney, city comptroller and in private law practice. How did this career trajectory come together? 

Well, I wish I could say there had been a blueprint; there definitely wasn’t. For example, when I returned from law school and was taking the bar exam, I said to my mom, “I’m not coming back to Brooklyn.” Famous last words – here I am, all these years later, and I’m talking from Brooklyn. So no, there was no grand scheme here.

But on the other hand, I guess I grew up with a with a family that had a passion for politics – my mom’s family and my mother, they were refugees from Russia at that time – and understood the importance of what government could do to them because one of the things they were fleeing was the the communist takeover in Ukraine. And so I was born in a family that cared about politics and cared about giving back to society, and somehow those values stayed with me and have permeated my life, even though I might not have had any choice in the permeation.

What career accomplishments are you most proud of?

One of the things I did was to create the Congresswomen’s Caucus, now called Congressional Caucus on Women’s Issues. It’s a bipartisan group and it works on improving the status of women in the United States. It’s lasted all this time on a bipartisan basis, and it’s produced many important results for America and for women and for families. 

Another thing that I did which was very important when I was DA, we challenged the idea that Black (people) could be removed from juries, that people could be removed from juries on a basis of race, and we challenged the right of the prosecutor to do that and the right of defense counsel to do that.

I’m also proud of the work I did on Nazi war criminals in Congress, uncovering their presence in the United States and fighting for many, many years to bring them to justice, including uncovering classified information about collaboration, if you will, after World War II with Nazi war criminals, bringing them to the U.S. and protecting them abroad.

I would say one of the other things I’m very proud of having done was to help to create something called the Fair Elections (Legal) Network, which is responsible for ensuring that obstacles to the right to vote are removed.

I co-authored the Refugee Act of 1980, that’s another what I would call a very important accomplishment. I was very proud to work with Sen. Ted Kennedy, one of the great senators of all time, and to set a firm foundation for the admission of refugees to the United States.

As a former chair of the House Immigration and Refugees Subcommittee, what are your thoughts on President Donald Trump’s immigration and deportation policies?

Well, I’m horrified. I don’t think the president has any power to send Americans to a foreign prison. You can’t imprison them in the United States without due process or without a legal framework for that, and there is no legal framework that allows him to deport Americans who have not committed any crime in that country or in the United States. Aside from maybe an immigration crime by coming here, he has no power.

As a former law enforcement official, what’s your reaction to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posing for photos in the El Salvador prison and on deportation raids while carrying a rifle? 

No, I mean no, it’s not appropriate. And beyond that, the president, in my opinion, does not have the power to arrange for the imprisonment of Americans abroad or people found in America abroad. That’s it. I mean, this is totally lawless, and the people who enable it or parade in front of it are enabling lawlessness.

Both as a member of the House Budget Committee and New York City comptroller, you’ve held fiscal oversight and auditing roles. What are your thoughts on the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency and how it is approaching cuts in the federal government?

I think DOGE is another horror. What DOGE is doing is not trying to make government work more efficiently. What it is trying to do is cut out programs the president doesn’t like. One of the things they want to do now is to get rid of Meals on Wheels. I mean, how cruel can you be and how stupid can government be? I mean, who could possibly object to Meals on Wheels? I mean, get rid of Head Start? That’s another thing they want to do that’s not getting rid of waste. That’s getting rid of programs that they don’t like. Closing down Social Security offices. What’s that about? Except to make Social Security harder for people. You want to make Social Security more efficient? Great, God bless, do that. It’s pretty efficient the way it works, but maybe it could work better.

It’s an outrage, it’s cruel, it’s inhumane, it’s wasteful. It will hurt America. It will hurt humanity, and it’s counterproductive. I don’t know if I can have enough adjectives to attack what they’re doing.

What is the path forward for the Democratic Party?

Not to be so timid to speak out about the outrages. I mean, there are those who advise, let the Republicans fall apart on their own, let Trump fall apart on his own. I don’t agree with that. I think that we need Democrats and the leadership in particular, because they have more credibility, they need to be calling out the attacks on Social Security and Meals on Wheels. They need to be calling out the attacks on Head Start. They need to be calling out the attack on science and brain cancer research, pediatric research and the like. They need to be calling out what’s happening with this lunatic (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) we have who’s the head of (the Department of) Health and Human Services. We thought that measles was eradicated in the United States. Now we have 800 cases, and people are predicting that in several years, we’ll have millions of cases, because they are anti-science, anti-vaccine. Where are we going to, the Stone Age? So we’ve got to speak out.