Rep. Walter Jones entered hospice care in January after he broke his hip in a fall. | T.J. Kirkpatrick/Getty Images Congress North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones dies at 76

Rep. Walter Jones, a Republican congressman of 24 years who honed a legacy for bucking the GOP on the Iraq war, died Sunday on his 76th birthday.

Jones — who faced no challenger last November — had already announced this would be his final term. The 13-term North Carolina Republican had not voted since September, and was too ill to travel to Washington for a swearing-in ceremony last month.


Jones was a staunch social conservative: a strong Catholic who fiercely opposed abortion and gay marriage. But he also had an independent streak that drove him to break ranks with his party more than any other Republican, on issues from campaign finance to the Russia investigation into President Donald Trump.

“He was never afraid to take a principled stand,” his office wrote in a statement confirming his death. “Some may not have agreed with him, but all recognized that he did what he thought was right.”

In the Trump era, Jones boasted that he was the only House Republican to vote against the GOP’s signature tax bill because it inflated the deficit. He also helped tank the GOP’s Obamacare repeal effort. He rarely — if ever — agreed to support bills to fund the government.

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Jones’ personal politics sometimes veered far from GOP doctrine: He has supported raising the minimum wage and was one of only three House Republicans to vote for President Barack Obama’s Wall Street crackdown in 2009.

His opposition to former Speaker John Boehner once cost him a plum committee assignment.

"I like to be a thorn in people’s ass," Jones told Roll Call in 2015.

The most notable condemnation of Republican orthodoxy, though, has been Jones’ stark reversal on Pentagon powers.

Once a strong supporter of the U.S. war with Iraq, Jones notably tried to change the name of “French fries” to “freedom fries” in the congressional cafeteria after France opposed the invasion.

But within two years of voting to authorize the war, Jones declared a change-of-heart after grieving with military families at funerals of their loved ones. He then became one of the GOP’s fiercest critics of the war, repeatedly working with Democrats on bills to pull out troops.

He also one of only two Republicans to oppose expanding President George W. Bush’s anti-terrorist surveillance program, and told a group of young conservatives in 2013: “Lyndon Johnson’s probably rotting in hell right now because of the Vietnam War, and he probably needs to move over for Dick Cheney.”



Jones’ highly public retreat from a war hawk eventually attracted numerous GOP primary challengers — particularly in a district with Camp Lejeune, one of the largest Marine Corps bases in the country — though none could ever unseat him.

Jones was one of the few remaining “Gingrich revolutionaries” in office after the 1994 GOP wave led by Georgia’s Newt Gingrich. Soft-spoken with Southern manners, the North Carolinian was once voted the No. 1 nicest member of Congress.

Before he was elected in 1994, Jones once ran and lost for Congress as a Democrat — the same party that elected his father, Walter Sr., to Congress for 26 years. Walter Jones Sr., also died in office.

A former businessman, Jones lived in the town of Farmville, N.C., until his death. While serving in Congress, Jones made the nearly 600-mile round-trip drive every weekend.

