WASHINGTON (ABP) — Longtime GOP Rep. Henry Hyde (Ill.), a champion of the anti-abortion movement who also earned unwanted attention for his role during President Clinton's impeachment, is dead at 83.
The office of House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced Nov. 29 that Hyde had died earlier that day in a Chicago hospital. Although the cause of death was not available at press time for this story, Hyde recently underwent heart surgery. The Chicago native retired from the House last year after more than three decades in office.
An attorney by training and an Illinois state legislator, Hyde was first elected to represent a suburban district that includes Chicago's O'Hare International Airport in 1974. He was not in Congress long before he garnered headlines by inserting an amendment into a federal spending bill that banned the expenditure of government funds on abortions.
Debate over the so-called “Hyde Amendment” became an annual fixture of negotiations over appropriations bills in the House. Conservative religious groups — including those representing Hyde's own Catholic background, as well as evangelical groups — counted him a hero in the movement to ban legal abortion.
“Henry Hyde was a champion in the fight to protect unborn children,” said Wanda Franz, president of the National Right to Life Committee, in a press release issued by that group shortly after Hyde's death. Franz added that the late congressman was “a passionate and dedicated ally of the pro-life movement. In both word and deed, Henry Hyde worked for the day that unborn children are again protected by law.”
While he served as chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, Hyde led then-unsuccessful efforts to pass a federal ban on so-called “partial-birth” abortions. While his efforts were unsuccessful, Congress eventually passed such a law. The Supreme Court, by the narrowest of margins, upheld that law last year.
But Hyde also had significant detractors. In his role as Judiciary Committee chairman in late 1998 and early 1999, he was one of the strongest advocates for impeaching Clinton for lying about an affair he had with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. At the height of the scandal, the online magazine Salon revealed that Hyde himself had had an affair with a married woman three decades before. The congressman brushed it off as a “youthful indiscretion,” although Hyde was in his 40s at the time of the affair.
He was, nonetheless, renowned for his oratorical skills. In a 2000 House floor debate on an abortion bill, Hyde vigorously defended his position.
“In this advanced democracy, in the year 2000, is it our crowning achievement that we have learned to treat people as things?” he said, according to the Congressional Record. “Our moment in history is marked by a mortal conflict between a culture of life and a culture of death. God put us in the world to do noble things — to love and to cherish our fellow human beings, not to destroy them. Today, we must choose sides.”
Both supporters and opponents also praised Hyde's old-fashioned collegiality and bipartisanship. Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy (Vt.) released a statement Nov. 29 saying the late congressman “was a credit to public service and to the House of Representatives, where he served so long and so ably. He practiced the ‘old school' values like civility, which help make the legislative process work. And he knew how to defuse a difficult situation with humor.”
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