By Steve Byas

It is with sadness that I heard on the morning of July 9 of the passing of former Senator Jim Inhofe, the longest-serving senator in our state’s history. First elected in 1994, Inhofe won re-election several times until his declining health forced his early retirement.

Inhofe served in the Oklahoma Legislature, first in the House, then in the Senate, before making an unsuccessful run for governor, then for Congress. After serving three terms as mayor of Tulsa, Inhofe ran for the U.S. House of Representatives again, this time taking the seat in 1986.

During his time in the House of Representatives, Inhofe introduced a bill to modify the “discharge petition.” The discharge petition could be used to force a bill out of a committee, if a majority of House members signed a petition to send it to the floor for a vote. The problem was that the reason a bill would be stuck in committee was usually because the Speaker of the House did not want it out. Not surprisingly, Inhofe’s bill was languishing in the committee to which it was assigned.

If someone wanted to sign Inhofe’s discharge petition, he or she had to go to the Speaker’s office to do so. The member could not reveal publicly who had signed the petition, or face a penalty of expulsion from the House. So, Inhofe and some sympathetic House members would go in and sign the petition and memorize the names on the petition since the last sympathetic member had signed.

Inhofe had come up with the brilliant plan of revealing who had not signed the petition, and the bill finally received a sufficient number of supporters to pass. Reader’s Digest took notice and ran the entire story in its then-widely read magazine.

When Senator David Boren (the man who had defeated Inhofe for governor in 1974) resigned to become president of the University of Oklahoma, Inhofe won the special election to replace him.

In the early days of the Covid Panic (March 2020), I read with interest a story in the Oklahoman newspaper. As with the rest of the newspaper, practically all of the stories concerned the COVID-19 pandemic. This one was about Senator James Inhofe and a group of Americans who had been stranded in Kenya due to the pandemic. The six were part of a group that traveled to the African nation on a medical mission trip, with an Oklahoma City-based group, the Maisha Project.

The group was prepared with lots of food and medicine. The trip was planned at a time when COVID-19 was not considered a problem in either Kenya or the U.S. When they arrived in Africa, there were zero cases in Kenya.

Then, on the fourth day, Kenya’s president ordered a quarantine for every person who had flown in from the U.S. in the past 14 days, because a Kenyan student had come down with the virus after traveling to America. Once the quarantine time was over, they could not get airplane tickets to leave the country. “Every flight they booked us got canceled within an hour. We had like 17 flights cancelled. Whole airports were cancelled,” said trip participant Amber English of Moore.

With food and medicines running out, the desperate group got no help from the U.S. Embassy.

Their state representative gave them connections to Senator Jim Inhofe. Someone then gave her Inhofe’s cellphone number.

“You could feel the hysteria they were expressing at that time,” Inhofe told the Oklahoman.

Fortunately, Inhofe had been involved in Africa on Christian missionary efforts for a quarter of a century, and had personal connections in Nairobi. These connections that Inhofe had led to Kenya Airways adding a second flight on a Monday evening, and the Oklahoma constituents of Inhofe were able to make a late flight out the day before Kenya closed its borders.

A senator with less experience – and with less concern – would have probably been unable to get his constituents out of Kenya.

And Inhofe had lots of experience, most of it good. Certainly, I do not agree with all of Inhofe’s votes and actions, but let us do a quick review of his career as a state legislator, mayor, and member of Congress.

It was Inhofe who was the voice crying in the wilderness against the scam known then as global warming (now usually called global climate change). When other politicians were hunkered down, meekly complying with the drumbeat of the national media, Inhofe recognized the socialist implications of what the Left was pushing. Today, it is more obvious with the so-called Green New Deal that would devastate our economy.

In 2008, when others, including Inhofe’s fellow senator from Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, buckled to the pressure and voted for the big bank bailout, Inhofe was in the minority voting against it.

Over the years, Inhofe has been consistently pro-life and pro-Second Amendment. He has been a stalwart for national defense. One would think that the typical conservative Republican would be thankful that we have had a person of Inhofe’s caliber in that office all of these years. Personally, I think a person who dedicates his life to limited government and the free enterprise system by serving in public office should be commended, not condemned. I don’t see just a whole lot of individuals out there who could fill his shoes.

Oklahoma is fortunate to have had Jim Inhofe as their United States Senator. A devout Christian, I think there is little doubt that he is now with the Lord.