Former Sen. James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who was a partisan warrior but nevertheless found ways to forge bipartisan ties on issues such as infrastructure and military policy, has died, according to the Tulsa World. He was 89.
First elected to the House in 1986, then to the Senate in 1994 before he resigned early last year, Inhofe was one of the most conservative members of Congress, especially on defense, energy and the environment. Despite his hard-line approach to many policy matters, the affable Inhofe was effective at selectively compromising with Democrats to get certain bills passed.
In the 117th Congress, Inhofe was the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, after having served as chairman from late 2018 through 2020.
Inhofe enjoyed a genuinely deep friendship with the committee’s current chairman, Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, who, like Inhofe, is an Army veteran.
“He’s a gentleman, and he’s someone who is very sincere in all he does,” Reed said of Inhofe in 2019. “We have a relationship in which we might disagree, but we keep everybody - each other, I should say - informed of where we are.”
Likewise, as a long-serving member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Inhofe had a kinship with former Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, with whom he worked - and with whom he often disagreed - over many years when she was the committee’s top Democrat and he the top Republican.
“We are total opposites,” Inhofe said of himself and Boxer at the time, “but we have a genuine love for each other.”
Despite the flashes of occasional agreement with Democrats, Inhofe was mostly a die-hard conservative. He repeatedly urged, for example, that the national defense budget grow as much as possible.
Inhofe argued in recent years that a growing military threat from China animated his desire to see defense spending grow. He tirelessly called attention to advances by China on systems such as hypersonic missiles and artificial intelligence.
Indeed, regardless of what the threat was seen to be at any given time, Inhofe long advocated for virtually every type of defense program - from missile defense to warships to nuclear weapons.
When Washington enacted caps on defense and nondefense spending from fiscal 2012 through fiscal 2021, Inhofe decried the limits on defense spending as destructive of U.S. security, though the drawing down of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan was the primary reason for a decline in defense spending during those years.
Unlike his predecessor as the Armed Services Committee’s top Republican, the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Inhofe only occasionally criticized military programs for overruns, technical snafus or scandals.
In 2021, Inhofe was an outspoken critic of President Joe Biden’s defense policies, nowhere more loudly than on the shambolic withdrawal of U.S. troops and civilians from Afghanistan.
Inhofe also unstintingly assailed Biden’s proposed requirements for vaccinating U.S. troops, Defense Department civilians and contractors against COVID-19.
When Donald Trump was president, Inhofe was one of his most gung-ho supporters in general and on defense matters in particular. He supported Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and Trump’s negotiations with North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un.
Inhofe had long criticized Democrats for backing “calendar-based” withdrawals from Iraq. But he commended Trump in 2020 for agreeing with the Taliban to reduce the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan and remove all U.S. forces by May 2021 as long as the Taliban honored its commitments.
In July 2020, Inhofe vowed to excise from the final fiscal 2021 defense authorization bill a provision that would have required the military to expunge homages to the Confederacy from its installations. He made the promise to Trump himself in a phone call, audio of which was later leaked to the New York Times. But Inhofe was not able to fulfill that promise, as the provisions remained when Congress overrode a Trump veto of the final bill.
A devout Presbyterian, Inhofe long opposed same-sex marriage. He opposed the 2010 law that cleared a path for gay men and women to serve openly in the military, and he resisted opening combat jobs to women.
Inhofe worked to stem the problem of sexual assault in the military, but he sided for several years with the Pentagon’s opposition to professionalizing decisions on when to prosecute such allegations.