Mike Castle, a beloved former governor who was Delaware’s longest-serving member of Congress, and whose stunning defeat by a Tea Party candidate in the 2010 primary campaign for the United States Senate augured a Republican eclipse in the state, died on Thursday in Greenville, Del. He was 86.
State officials announced the death, at a care community. The announcement said only that he died after a long illness.
In his more than 40 years as an elected official, Mr. Castle was a fiscal conservative and a social moderate.
As one of the last centrist Republicans in Congress and a champion of bipartisanship, he favored abortion rights and supported President Bill Clinton’s ban on assault weapons (they got to know each other as governors) as well as welfare-to-work provisions that increased coverage for child care and Medicaid; a measure that empowered the president to veto individual appropriations in spending bills; and President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act to improve public schools.
An avid numismatist, he sponsored legislation that authorized the Treasury to mint quarters commemorating the 50 states and presidential dollar coins. A bill he sponsored in 2011 that authorized the production of an American Platinum Eagle bullion coin would theoretically allow the government to mint a trillion-dollar coin to avoid default if Congress refused to raise the federal debt ceiling.
Former President Joseph R. Biden, a Democrat whose Senate seat Mr. Castle had hoped to fill in 2010 after Mr. Biden became vice president, described his former congressional colleague (and his fellow commuter between Delaware and Washington) in a statement as “a man of his word who time and again put country over self” and a figure of such integrity that “you couldn’t find another member of Congress who would say a bad word about him.”
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