Was State’s Longest Serving Senator... And Our Dear, Dear Friend...

James Mountain Inhofe, a Republican retired Senator from Oklahoma, has died at the age of 89 after suffering a stroke on July 4. 

He had retired from the Senate in 2023 because of his health, and had four years left in his term. He was Oklahoma’s longest serving Senator who served as chairman of both the Armed Services and the Environment and Public Works committees. He was a partisan iconoclast who nonetheless was able to reach across the aisle on certain issues such as military policy and infrastructure, especially when he saw benefit for the Republican party. He was one of the most conservative members of Congress particularly on energy, defense, and the environment, and he strongly opposed regulatory overreach on those issues.

Despite his strong views, he was considered an affable guy who developed genuine friendships with some who might have been his most strenuous opponents. Notably, when he was Ranking Member of the Armed Services Committee, he had a deep friendship with his Democrat colleague Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island who, like Inhofe, is an Army veteran and is now the committee’s current chairman.

Sen. Reed in 2019 said this of Inhofe, “He’s a gentleman, and he’s someone who is very sincere in all he does. We have a relationship in which we might disagree, but we keep everybody — each other, I should say — informed of where we are.”

Similarly, during his long-serving membership on the Environment and Public Works Committee, Inhofe had a great kinship with former Sen. Barbara Boxer of California when they were both top-ranked in their parties on the committee. In 2012 he helped get a two-year transportation bill to the president’s desk by working closely with Boxer and by convincing Republican colleagues the $120 billion bill would aid the party at the polls. Of himself and Boxer, Inhofe said at the time, “We are total opposites, but we have a genuine love for each other.”

He was a pilot for about 50 years and his passion for it influenced his work in Congress by introducing aviation legislation. In 2012 just before his 78th birthday he bought an aerobatic plane and loved flying it. At the time, he told the Tulsa Rotary Club he would quit running for reelection only “when I can no longer fly an airplane upside down.” One of his campaign ads in 2020 showed him flying inverted and at one point he said, “I’ve always set out to serve you as a United States senator as long as I can fly upside down.”

ANN E-I-C Note: We are truly heartbroken to report this... Jim was a tremendous man, a good friend, a great aviator and one of the best friends aviation EVER had... and boy, will we miss him. -- Jim Campbell

FMI: https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/i000024