DuPage County is one of the collar counties bordering Chicago. For years, it had the great good sense to send to the U.S. House of Representatives a man the late Cokie Roberts, no liberal, once described as “the smartest person in Congress”: Henry J. Hyde, undisputed leader of congressional pro-life forces and author of the Hyde Amendment, which banned virtually all federal funding of abortion.
Three years after Hyde’s death in 2007, DuPage County — then rather red — named its courthouse the Henry J. Hyde Judicial Facility. It was a fitting salute to a distinguished public servant who had once chaired the House Judiciary Committee with eminent fairness.
But that was then, this is now, and DuPage County today is a very blue jurisdiction, replete with suburbanites apoplectic over the present administration: suburban women who consider abortion-on-demand the first of constitutional rights; suburban activists who display their virtue by braying loudly about sheltering illegal immigrants and then, when those poor souls arrive, put them on the first buses and trains to Chicago.
So last month, the DuPage County Board voted 10-5 to strip Hyde’s name from the courthouse, renaming it the DuPage County Judicial Office Facility.Thus did the county board members underscore that Democrats have learned virtually nothing from the 2024 elections. I had the privilege of working with Congressman Hyde for over 20 years.
From my memory bank of those stirring days, two episodes stand out for their sharp contrast to the rancid condition of our politics today. In January 1995, Henry was chairing a meeting of the Judiciary Committee for the first time. The now-minority Democrats were still gobsmacked from losing control of the House after a 40-year suzerainty dating to the first Eisenhower administration. Chairman Hyde did not, however, rub the minority’s nose in its defeat.
Rather, he spoke about the meaning of justice: “In our American system, justice is not an abstraction. Like all the virtues, justice is a moral habit; we become a just society by acting justly. The duty to ‘promote justice,’ which we lay upon ourselves when we pledge to defend the Constitution, is a duty we exercise through the instrument of the law. For the ‘rule of law’ distinguishes civilized societies from barbarism … “What we do here we ought to do as a matter of vocation: as a matter of giving flesh and blood to our convictions about justice — our moral duty to give everyone his due.”
The two ranking minority members of the committee, John Conyers and Patricia Schroeder, who lived on a different political planet than Henry Hyde, were so moved that they reached across the dais to shake the chair-man’s hand. Some years earlier, Jim Wright, the hyper-Democratic Speaker of the House, indulged himself in a spasm of bipartisanship and invited Congressman Hyde to address aluncheon Wright was hosting for newly elected Members of Congress.
After displaying the wit that made him one of the great joke-tellers of all time, Henry got serious: “You are basking in the glow of victory, and that is entirely understandable. But permit me to suggest, on the basis of long experience, that if you don’t know what you’re willing to lose your seat for, you’re going to do a lot of damage up here. You have to know what you’re willing to lose everything for if you’re going to be the kind of Member of Congress this country needs.”
Might today’s congressional bobbleheads, terrorized by social media mobs, ponder that? Henry Hyde, one of the most influential Catholics in public life in modern times, was not only a pro-life leader of great consequence. As a close student of history, he was a prudent, skillful legislator who was no more moved by ideologues of the right than by ideologues of the left. He thought the notion that minors had a constitutional right to own assault weapons ridiculous.
A World War II veteran, he was a staunch internationalist who understood that isolationism was no option in a world where “there be dragons” (as ancient sea charts used to describe potential danger zones). He fought for the human rights of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain as forcefully as he fought for the right to life of the unborn; he would have been appalled at attempts to appease the new Russian imperialism of KGB-Man Incarnate, Vladimir Putin.
So, here is a suggestion for the Trump administration and Congress: Name a federal courthouse in the Land of Lincoln after Henry J. Hyde. Lincoln would have approved. So would St. Thomas More, whose portrait Henry prominently displayed in his congressional office.
Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow and William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies of the
Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington, D.C.