Steven was our class president.  He fought a courageous battle with pancreatic cancer.

Steven LaTourette, Congressman Who Despised Gridlock, Dies at 62

By SAM ROBERTS

AUG. 4, 2016

Steven C. LaTourette, a Republican congressman from Ohio, on Capitol Hill in 2009.CreditSusan Walsh/Associated Press

 Steven C. LaTourette, a centrist Ohio Republican who retired after nine terms in Congress saying he was disgusted with partisan gridlock, died on Wednesday at his home in McLean, Va. He was 62.

His daughter Sarah, a state representative in Ohio, said the cause was pancreatic cancer, a disease Mr. LaTourette said Capitol doctors had misdiagnosed.

After he decided in 2012 not to seek re-election, Mr. LaTourette became president of Republican Main Street Partnership, which supports centrist Republicans against Tea Party insurgents.

He had been elected from Northeast Ohio in 1994, when Republicans gained 54 seats in the House of Representatives. An iconoclastic former prosecutor, he was a loyal supporter of his fellow Ohioan John A. Boehner, the former House speaker, who, similarly frustrated with trying to corral a Republican majority fractured by Tea Party conservatives, announced in 2015 that he was resigning from Congress.

While Mr. LaTourette voted against abortion and gun control, he was considered a moderate by contemporary standards. Before he announced his retirement, National Journal ranked him as the second-most liberal Republican congressman, after Walter Jones of North Carolina. When he decided not to seek re-election, he expressed his contempt for Tea Party representatives, calling them obstructionists.

“What, these chuckleheads think that having Nancy Pelosi speaker of the House is better for the Republican Party? I don’t think so,” Mr. LaTourette said when conservatives revolted against Mr. Boehner in 2013. “So they really have to come to terms with why are they here? If they’re just here to vote no — we can train a monkey to vote no.”

While irreverent, he was a skilled parliamentarian who was often deployed to referee combative debates. Finally, though, he said he had “reached the conclusion that the atmosphere” in the House “no longer encourages the finding of common ground.”

He was particularly frustrated over congressional struggles to agree on highway appropriations and on reducing the deficit. He broke with his fellow Republicans by opposing the federal bank bailout in 2008, supporting expanded unemployment benefits during the recession, and refusing to rule out tax increases as a way to reduce the budget gap.

Mr. Boehner praised Mr. LaTourette on Thursday as “one of the most honest and loyal souls I ever had the privilege of knowing.”

Steven Clare LaTourette was born on July 22, 1954, in Cleveland, the son of Eugene LaTourette, an accountant, and the former Patricia Munn, who worked for a life insurance agency.

He graduated from the University of Michigan and from the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University. In 1990, as Lake County prosecutor, he won the conviction of Jeffrey Lundgren, a cult leader who was executed for killing a family of five.

Mr. LaTourette is survived by his father; his wife, the former Jennifer Laptook; their children, Emerson and Henry LaTourette; his children, Sarah, Sam, Clare and Amy LaTourette, from his first marriage, to the former Susan Koprowski; a grandson; and several siblings.

In 2015, as the first step toward a lawsuit, Mr. LaTourette filed a claim against the government accusing Capitol doctors of failing to recommend that a lesion be monitored after they had diagnosed his stomach pain as pancreatitis in 2012. He had received medical care from them over his 18 years in Congress.

In 2014, he said, his private doctors discovered a cancerous mass that had grown significantly over the previous two years.

Paul D. Ryan, the House speaker, said on Thursday, “Nobody could match his fierce sense of duty or his great sense of humor.”

When Mr. LaTourette was first elected, he hired the humor columnist Dave Barry as a spokesman. To the columnist’s surprise, he delivered Mr. Barry’s prepared remarks during a floor debate on tort reform.

“As a lawyer, I am the last person to suggest that everybody in my profession is a money-grubbing, scum-sucking toad,” Mr. LaTourette read from his text, poker-faced. “The actual figure is only about 73 percent.” He then added: “Ha-ha, I am of course just pulling the speaker’s honorable leg. The vast majority of lawyers are responsible professionals as well as, in many ways, human beings.”