WASHINGTON — A former House lawmaker, Henry Hyde, who led the impeachment inquiry of President Clinton and helped block federal funding for abortions during 16 terms in office, died this morning. He was 83.

Mary Ann Schultz, a spokeswoman for Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said he died in his sleep at the hospital at about 2:30 a.m. local time. Hyde succumbed to cardiac arrest after being admitted to the hospital on November 25 for renal failure related to a heart condition, she said. He underwent open-heart bypass surgery in July.

Hyde, a Republican who represented the western suburbs of Chicago for 32 years, didn’t run for re-election in 2006. Republican lawmakers yesterday called him a patriot and a pioneer in the effort to restrict abortion rights. “I have long included Henry Hyde among my heroes,” the House minority leader, Rep. John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said. “He will be remembered as a gentleman who stood as a beacon for the bedrock principles of liberty, justice, and, above all, respect for life.”

The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, called Hyde “a committed warrior in the fight to protect the unborn.”

“His legacy exceeds his years as a legislator and expands far beyond the borders of the district he served and the nation he loved,” Mr. McConnell said in a written statement.

President Bush released a statement saying that Hyde “used his talents to build a more hopeful America and promote a culture of life.”

Mr. Bush earlier this month awarded Hyde the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civil honor given by the White House, calling him a “fearless defender of life in all its forms.”

Hyde is best known for an amendment he attached to an annual spending bill in 1976 restricting federal funding for abortions. The amendment passed three years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. While exceptions were later carved out for women who became pregnant as a result of incest or rape or if a mother’s life is endangered, the so-called Hyde amendment continues to be a fixture in American law.

“The pro-family movement lost one of its most passionate defenders of human life,” James Dobson, the head of the activist group Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs, Colo., said. “It is impossible to calculate how many millions of babies were spared because of his courageous work.”

Hyde also led the Judiciary Committee when the Republican-controlled House impeached Mr. Clinton, a Democrat, in 1999 over lying about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The Senate acquitted Mr. Clinton. When an online publication reported in 1998 that Hyde had an affair 30 years earlier, when he was in his 40s, Hyde called it a “youthful indiscretion.”

Hyde grew up in Chicago as an Irish Catholic Democrat. He attended Georgetown University on a basketball scholarship and played on the team that lost to Wyoming in the 1943 national championship game. In 1952, he switched parties, and in 1966. he was elected to the Illinois state House where he eventually became majority leader. He was elected to the U.S. House in 1974, bucking the post-Watergate backlash against the Republican Party.

Hyde served as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee in the early 1990s. He ran the Judiciary Committee for six years before term-limit rules required him to step down at the end of 2000. Hyde then moved over the Committee on International Relations, which he chaired for the duration of his career.

Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat who now heads the renamed Committee on Foreign Affairs, issued a statement hailing Hyde’s stewardship of the panel. “My dear friend, Henry Hyde, was a giant,” Mr. Lantos said. “He will be greatly missed,” Mr. Lantos said.