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…