Jim Inhofe, 1934-2024

President Joe Biden could take some advice from Sen. James Mountain Inhofe (R-OK). Running his last Senate race at 85, he faced criticism that he was too old for the job.

A pilot, Inhofe announced his bid for a fifth term by flying an airplane upside down. “When I can no longer fly a plane upside down, then I’m too old to be in the United States Senate,” he said. He won nearly 63% of the vote, beating a Democratic opponent 55 years his junior by 30 points, though he retired before completing his term.

Nevertheless, Inhofe served nearly 30 years in the Senate. He had already been in Washington as a member of the House for almost eight years when he got an early start in the upper chamber as part of the 1994 “Republican Revolution.”

The staunch conservative won a special election to replace Sen. David Boren, himself a not terribly liberal Democrat who often went against the Clinton administration, who had departed to become president of the University of Oklahoma. Republicans won control of the Senate that day, but Inhofe was sworn in nine days later to fill the vacancy and seated before the new GOP majority.

Inhofe died at age 89 on July 9. It was his battles on behalf of the energy industry against progressive climate activists that headline writers remembered most. A Politico newsletter memorialized him as a senator “who called climate change a ‘hoax.’” The New York Times described him as a “senator who denied climate change.” The Washington Post remembered him as an “Oklahoma senator and climate-change denier.” The Wall Street Journal called him “a former Oklahoma senator who denied climate science.” NBC News was a bit more expansive, dubbing Inhofe “a defense hawk who called human-caused climate change a ‘hoax.’”

The lawmaker was a defense hawk, taking over the Senate Armed Services Committee from Sen. John McCain after the Arizona Republican’s death from cancer in 2018. Inhofe also did have a lot to say about climate change, little of which Democrats liked.

“With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people?” Inhofe said in a 2003 Senate floor speech. “It sure sounds like it.” This was not an unusual Republican opinion at that time. Inhofe became chairman of the Senate environment committee in 2015 after Republicans finally won the Senate during former President Barack Obama’s last midterm election.

Across the aisle, Inhofe was remembered as a longtime champion of conservative causes: limited government, a strong national defense, the right to life, the traditional family, and making English the official language of the United States. He retired with a 94% lifetime conservative rating from the Conservative Political Action Conference, formerly known as the American Conservative Union.

Inhofe was first elected to the Oklahoma House of Representatives in 1966 before moving up to the state Senate in 1969. Inhofe then served three terms as mayor of Tulsa before arriving in Washington as a congressman in 1987 for the final years of the Reagan administration. His career in elected office lasted nearly 60 years.

In both the House and Oklahoma’s state legislature, Inhofe often toiled in the minority. But after 1994, Republican majorities were no longer unusual on Capitol Hill. Today, Republicans also hold 81 of the 101 seats in the lower house of the Oklahoma legislature and a supermajority of 40 seats in the 48-member upper chamber.

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Inhofe was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1934. He served in the U.S. Army until 1958 and held various positions in a life insurance company founded by his father, becoming president in 1970. He participated in the graduation ceremony at the University of Tulsa in 1959 despite being a few credits short. He finished his coursework in 1973.

“What I suspect so many of our colleagues will remember most about Jim was his honesty, his decency, and his deep faith, his love of God, love of country, and love of neighbor,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said on the Senate floor after Inhofe’s death. “It would be difficult for anyone to hope for a richer legacy than that.”

W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.