Jon Kyl, the Arizona Republican Who Spent 15 Years Behind the Scenes on the Biggest Tribal Water Settlement in History and Then Walked Brett Kavanaugh Through the Senate, Has Died at 84.

Former Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, a Republican who rose to minority whip, shaped the water law that governs the driest state in the country and returned to the Capitol in 2018 to guide Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court, died Thursday at 84, his family said. The cause was complications of a neurological disease. Kyl had announced a dementia diagnosis and withdrawn from public life in December 2025.

Kyl spent nearly three decades in Congress: eight years in the House beginning in 1987, 18 in the Senate, and a partial term of less than four months in 2018 after Gov. Doug Ducey appointed him to fill the seat left vacant by John McCain's death. His career began under Ronald Reagan and ended under Donald Trump, and he watched his party transform around him. Ducey, who considered Kyl a mentor, described him in a February 2025 interview with The Associated Press as a statesman and a "workhorse" among Washington's show horses. "If you saw him on the plane, he was sitting in the aisle, in coach, and he was reading," Ducey said. "And he was reading potential bills or Senate business."

Kyl was born in Oakland, Nebraska, on April 25, 1942, and grew up in a rural Iowa district his father represented in the U.S. House. He left at 18 for the University of Arizona, where he met his wife, Caryll, and earned a law degree. Before he ever ran for office, he was a lawyer for a large water utility and a key participant in writing Arizona's 1980 groundwater code, the first regulatory framework of its kind in the country for managing groundwater in the state's population centers around Phoenix and Tucson.

Water remained his signature issue. In 2004 he authored legislation that produced one of the largest tribal water rights settlements in American history, ending a decades-long fight and guaranteeing the Gila River Indian Community enough water each year to fill roughly 313,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Mitch McConnell, in a 2012 floor speech, called Kyl's work ethic "legendary" and said he had labored mostly out of view for 15 years to get the deal done. "It was one of the hardest things I've ever done, but I was in a position to be the catalyst," Kyl told the Phoenix New Times in 2006. "There wasn't anybody else who could do that water deal. And it had to be done." Arizona State University's Kyl Center for Water Policy carries his name.

His record on immigration ran both directions. He backed legislation authorizing a fence along hundreds of miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, and later joined Democrats on a bill that would have created a path to citizenship and a temporary guest-worker program; it failed. Ducey said Kyl's biggest imprint came from holding the Republican caucus together against the Affordable Care Act and from his firm support for Israel. In a 2012 conversation with former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Kyl offered his own assessment: "At the federal level, and I regret to say that this is the case, but probably a lot of my better achievements were in preventing bad things from happening (rather) than forcing good things to happen."

After retiring from the Senate in 2013, Kyl became a lobbyist at Covington and Burling. When Trump nominated Kavanaugh in 2018, Kyl served as the nominee's "Sherpa," the informal title for the guide who walks a Supreme Court pick through the Senate. Weeks later, Ducey sent him back to the chamber himself to fill McCain's seat. Trump called him "the extraordinary senator." Kyl stayed less than four months before returning to the firm.

Sarah Porter, who directs the Kyl Center at ASU, said Kyl was generous with his time and took a practical approach to water policy that always looked ahead. "He's always sort of cared about the public good and been able to think about, 'What will this mean for the generations to come?'" she said, adding that he remained "quite a dynamo" until recent years as his wife battled health problems.

When he disclosed his dementia diagnosis, Kyl recalled the letter Ronald Reagan wrote to the country after his own Alzheimer's diagnosis, describing a journey that would carry him to the end of his life. Kyl said he shared Reagan's confidence in Arizona and the nation's future, and that despite the diagnosis, he was a "very fortunate man."