DuPage Courthouse To Be Renamed For Henry Hyde
WHEATON, Ill. (CBS) - The DuPage County courthouse in Wheaton will soon be renamed for the late U.S. Congressman Henry Hyde.
Hyde served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 32 years. He served in the Illinois House for a decade before that.
Hyde retired from Congress in January 2007, and died on Nov. 29 of the same year. Shortly before his death, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Hyde was born in Chicago on April 18, 1924, where he was an all-city basketball center. After serving in the Navy from 1944 to 1946, seeing combat in the Philippines, he graduated from Georgetown University in 1947 and returned to Chicago to earn a law degree from Loyola in 1949.
Raised a Democrat, he switched parties to vote for Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952. He worked as a Chicago trial lawyer before winning a seat in the Illinois House in 1966 and then in the U.S. House in 1974.
He was a conservative when the Republican Party was still dominated by moderates.
He made a name for himself in 1976, just two years after his first election from the district that includes O'Hare Airport, by attaching an amendment to a spending bill banning the use of federal funds to carry out abortions.
Hyde was also a leader in passing the ban on so-called partial birth abortions, the first federal restriction on a specific abortion procedure. "The people we pretend to defend, the powerless, those who cannot escape, who cannot rise up in the streets, these are the ones that ought to be protected by the law," he said during the 2003 debate. "The law exists to protect the weak from the strong."
Hyde gained elder statesman status when young conservatives propelled the GOP into control of the House in 1994.
In that role and as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, in 1998 Hyde led House efforts to impeach Clinton for allegedly lying about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and then in 1999 was the chief House manager in the unsuccessful bid to win a Senate conviction.
Republican Peter Roskam was elected to Hyde's seat in 2006.
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