Sheryl Gay Stolberg and David Stout

His death was confirmed by his wife, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, the Maryland state Democratic chairwoman. A spokeswoman, Trudy Perkins, said in a statement that Elijah Cummings had died of “complications concerning long-standing health challenges.” No other details were given.

Cummings, who was serving his 13th term representing Maryland, had been in poor health. In recent years he had begun making his way around the Capitol in a motorized scooter and using a walker to steady himself. In 2017, he was in the hospital for two months after complications of a heart valve replacement — convinced, he told The New York Times in May, that he was “living on borrowed time.”

With a booming voice and speaking cadence that hinted of the pulpit — his parents were preachers — Cummings was a compelling figure on Capitol Hill, at times gruff but always respected. For more than two decades, he represented a section of Baltimore with more than its share of social problems. He campaigned tirelessly for stricter gun control laws and help for those addicted to drugs.

But it was as chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform — the panel charged with maintaining integrity in government — that Cummings may have left his most lasting legacy. The position gave him sweeping power to investigate Trump and his administration — and he used it.

He sparred with Trump in the most public of ways. In February, he summoned the president’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to testify about hush money payments to women who claimed to have had an affair with Trump; Cohen denounced Trump as a “racist” and a “con man.” And Cummings issued subpoenas for Trump’s financial records; Trump responded by suing him, prompting him to call the president’s effort to block congressional inquiries “far worse than Watergate.”

In an interview with The Times in May, Cummings was asked what message he would like to send to the president.

“I want to send a message that we have one life to live, Mr. President,” he replied. “This is no dress rehearsal. And that the American people simply want to live their lives without fear of their leaders. And we, as leaders, have a duty and a responsibility to keep our promise to them when we ran for office and won — and that is to make their lives better. While we’re all on this earth, that’s my message.”

Even as his health kept him away from Washington in recent months, Cummings, a close ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, remained involved in the impeachment inquiry into Trump. Those close to him said that he joined strategy calls with Pelosi and other chairmen, and signed subpoenas from his hospital bed.

“In the House, Elijah was our North Star,” Pelosi said in a statement. “He was a leader of towering character and integrity, whose stirring voice and steadfast values pushed the Congress and country to rise always to a higher purpose.”

Trump, in turn, hurled insults at Cummings, calling him “racist” and “a brutal bully” who had done “a very poor job” representing his constituents in Baltimore, which the president declared a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”

But on Thursday, in a rare show of politeness toward his political foe, Trump offered his condolences to Cummings’ family and praised the congressman on Twitter. “My warmest condolences to the family and many friends of Congressman Elijah Cummings,” he wrote. “I got to see first hand the strength, passion and wisdom of this highly respected political leader. His work and voice on so many fronts will be very hard, if not impossible, to replace!”

In the Capitol, where flags were lowered to half-staff in Cummings’ memory, members of both parties praised him for his social conscience and dogged determination, using words like “tough” and “dignified” to describe him.

“I can’t tell you how many friends would call me and be in fear because they got a letter from Cummings,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader, said on the House floor. “But he was a man of fairness.”

Even Trey Gowdy, the Republican former congressman from South Carolina who fought bitterly with Cummings during the 2012 hearings into the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, said on Twitter that “Elijah Cummings was one of the most powerful, beautiful &amp; compelling voices in American politics.”

He added: “The power and the beauty came from his authenticity, his conviction, the sincerity with which he held his beliefs. We rarely agreed on political matters.”

Cummings prided himself on his slow, methodical manner, but he could also work himself into a fiery oration, when his brow would furrow deeply and his voice would quiver with emotion.

When Hillary Clinton, then the former secretary of state, testified before the committee investigating Benghazi, Cummings, the panel’s top Democrat, flew into a fury as she withstood hours of withering questions from Republicans.

“I don’t know what we want from you,” Cummings cried, accusing Republicans of using taxpayer dollars to try to destroy Clinton’s presidential campaign. “Do we want to badger you over and over again until you do get so tired so we get the gotcha moment?”

When Cohen testified before him in February, the most arresting moment came not from the witness but from the congressman himself. “We have got to get back to normal!” Cummings thundered from the dais in an impassioned eight-minute closing statement that quickly went viral.

Elijah Eugene Cummings was born on Jan. 18, 1951, in Baltimore, one of seven children of Robert and Ruth Cummings, and grew up in the city when it was still deeply segregated. His parents were former sharecroppers from South Carolina who had moved north to improve prospects for themselves and their children.

Cummings often spoke of his mother, who did domestic work and eventually founded her own church with “only a fourth grade education,” he said. Her humble past had a profound influence on him.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Howard University in Washington, where he was student government president, with a degree in political science. He earned a law degree from the University of Maryland and was a practicing lawyer while serving for 14 years in the Maryland House of Delegates, where he was the first African American in the state’s history to be named speaker pro tem.

He was eyeing a seat in the Maryland Senate, where Democrats were in the minority, when he ran in a special election in 1996 to fill the seat vacated by Kweisi Mfume, who resigned to become president of the NAACP. He beat more than two dozen other Democrats in a crowded primary, which in heavily Democratic Baltimore is tantamount to winning the general election, and never had a serious challenge after that.

In Washington, Cummings became active in the Congressional Black Caucus and served a term as chairman. One caucus member, Rep. Lacy Clay, said Cummings took pains to mentor him when he was a freshman, teaching him “life lessons” and instructing him in the ways of Congress.

Gun control was a political as well as a personal issue for Cummings. In June 2011, his nephew Christopher Cummings was shot to death in Virginia, where he was a college student.

In 2015, as Baltimore — and his own West Baltimore neighborhood — erupted into riots after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a young black man who had died in police custody, Cummings took to the streets, bullhorn in hand, to plead for calm. Hours earlier, ever the preachers’ son, he had delivered Gray’s eulogy.

“Did you see him?!” Cummings roared, his voice rising in anger as he implored the congregation to confront the invisibility of young black men. “Did you see him? Did you see him?” The congregation roared back with applause.

Cummings rose through the ranks of the Oversight Committee to become its top Democrat. In 2019, after Democrats took control of the House, he ascended to the chairmanship, a role that gave him wide latitude.

He used his authority broadly, investigating everything from whether Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, was truthful in explaining why he had added a citizenship question to the 2020 census to policy matters, like military suicides and the high cost of prescription drugs. (Pelosi has appointed Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York as the acting chairwoman.)

The relationship between Trump and Cummings got off to a rocky start. In an April 2017 interview with The New York Times, Trump recounted their first meeting, “Elijah Cumming was in my office and he said, ‘You will go down as one of the great presidents in the history of our country.’”

The congressman promptly issued a statement saying he had been misquoted.

“During my meeting with the president and on several occasions since then, I have said repeatedly that he could be a great president if — if — he takes steps to truly represent all Americans rather than continuing on the divisive and harmful path he is currently on,” the statement said.

That year Cummings became ill, prompting his wife to abandon a bid for governor.

“He worked until his last breath,” she said in a statement Thursday, “because he believed our democracy was the highest and best expression of our collective humanity and that our nation’s diversity was our promise, not our problem.”

In addition to his wife, Cummings’ survivors include two daughters, Jennifer and Adia Cummings, and six siblings: Robert Cummings Jr., Cheretheria Blount, James Cummings, Diane Woodson, Carnel Cummings and Yvonne Cummings Jennings.

Cummings was spiritual in his approach to his illness and his life. In the interview in May, he told the story of how one day, when was in such dire pain that he thought he might faint, a hospital worker turned up at his bedside, saying the Lord had sent her to deliver a message: “I’m just trying to get your attention. I’m not done with you.”

In his final months in the Capitol, Cummings liked to sit in his wheelchair in front of the fireplace in the Speaker’s Lobby, the ornate chamber off the House floor, where he would read quietly or field questions from reporters. On Thursday, there was a fire going there. But Cummings’ spot was empty.

This article originally appeared in

Elijah Cummings, Powerful Democrat Who Investigated Trump, Dies at 68

WASHINGTON — Rep. Elijah Cummings, a son of sharecroppers who rose to become one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress and a central figure in the impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump, died Thursday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He was 68.

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Elijah Cummings, Powerful Democrat Who Investigated Trump, Dies at 68