Congressional Democrats have ousted longtime Michigan Rep. John Dingell as chairman of the influential House Energy and Commerce Committee and replaced him with the more progressive Rep. Henry Waxman of California.

The 137-122 vote puts Waxman in charge of a committee that is crucial to many of the top legislative issues dear to President-elect Barack Obama, including energy, the environment and health care.

Waxman’s challenge has stirred up the environmental blogosphere. Dingell had been chairman or ranking Democrat of the committee since 1981. After leaving today’s closed-door vote, Waxman told reporters, “Seniority is important, but it should not be a grant of property rights to be chairman for three decades or more,” Politico reported.

He had complained in the past that the committee has not moved quickly enough on global warming and other issues, The Los Angeles Times reported today.

Dingell, 82, was seen by many as too close a friend to the energy and transportation industries. The blog Wonk Room recently reported that he and his supporters had substantially more financial contributions from the oil and coal industries than Waxman and his supporters — six times more from Big Oil, nine times more from King Coal.

Dingell himself attacked Waxman in a recent radio interview, the environmental blog Gristmill reported, calling the California congressman an “anti-manufacturing left-wing Democrat” who has a “serious lack of understanding of people in the auto industry and manufacturing generally.”

It was unclear how the New Mexico delegation voted, but the Independent reported yesterday that Rep.-elect Harry Teague, from the 2nd Congressional District, was a Dingell supporter. Neither Reps.-elect Martin Heinrich (CD1) nor Ben Ray Lujan (CD3) had chosen sides yesterday, but both were advocates of green energy while on the campaign trail.

More from The Washington Independent:

Dingell, the longest-serving member of Congress, has close ties to Detroit’s automakers. For decades he’s led efforts to thwart the plans of some other Democrats to limit tailpipe emissions and raise fuel-efficiency standards. Waxman, just elected to his 18th term, has long advocated for these changes. With an Obama administration set to take the White House in January, environmentalists are drooling at the thought that the liberal Californian could be the gatekeeper to many of Obama’s ambitious green-energy plans — which would have to pass through the Energy and Commerce Committee.

NMI’s Matt Reichbach contributed to this report