According to his office, longtime Democratic Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha passed away this afternoon. He was 77 years old.

A prominent member of the House given his role in the appropriations process, Murtha had been in the hospital for about a week after complications in the surgery to remove his gallbladder.

A 19-term member, he had become known in recent years as a vocal opponent of conservatives, and was under investigation for his questionable ties to firms benefited by earmarks. A year ago today, the FBI conducted a raid on one of the companies in question, and the ethical cloud has persisted over the past year. Murtha was always a money-grubber — he even earned the nickname “The King of Pork.”

Despite those ethical questions, Murtha will be missed, and not just by Democrats — he is a classic old-school politician of the blue-collar Northeastern Democrat sort that is rare these days. One of my favorite Murtha stories is one related by P.J. O’Rourke in an old essay for Rolling Stone about the Marcos/Aquino elections in the Philippines. As members like Kerry and Lugar pretended everything was going well, Murtha couldn’t help but let loose:

The only plain-spoken delegate I encountered was representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat who, I’m pleased to note, is still in Congress. He was watching a remarkable number of Marcos votes being counted in the pro-Aquino Manila suburb of Pasay. Murtha, I wrote, “tried to make some statesmanlike noises about ‘the passionate commitment of the Philippine people to democracy.’…But outrage overtook him. ‘You can see what’s going on!’ he blurted. ‘You can see what the will of the people is!’”

R.I.P.