Pat Williams, RIP
By 
Even though it wasn’t that long ago, we’ve almost forgotten how pretty progressive policymakers could come from the Rocky Mountain states. As Colorado, New Mexico ,and to a lesser extent Arizona and Nevada have moved to the left, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana have sprinted to the right. But not long ago, Utah had Frank Moss in the Senate. Idaho not only had Frank Church in the Senate but elected Cecil Andrus four times as governor. Even Wyoming had Dave Freudenthal as governor, a situation completely unimaginable today. Montana was more progressive than any of these states and that’s only recently ended with the defeat of Jon Tester. The Treasure State has had a lot of good politicians for a long time, going back to people such as James Murray and Mike Mansfield. One of them was Pat Williams, who was excellent and who just died.
Mr. Williams championed wilderness protection, federal arts funding and family-friendly social policies. He retired from the House in 1997 after 18 years, the longest consecutive tenure by a Montana congressman.
His most notable election came in 1992, when Montana had been chiseled down to a single congressional seat, from two, after the 1990 census.
Mr. Williams, who represented the state’s more liberal forested western half, faced Representative Ron Marlenee, a Republican who served the conservative ranchland of eastern Montana.
The left-versus-right showdown was fought over the use of the state’s vast natural resources and whether the New Deal-era safety net for the vulnerable still mattered. Mr. Williams won narrowly, with 51 percent of the vote.
In Washington, he was a co-sponsor of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which gave workers 12 weeks of unpaid time off to care for a newborn or a sick family member. Multiple attempts to enact the law under the Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had failed. Mr. Williams called those administrations “frozen in the ice of their own indifference” to working people.
The law was signed by President Bill Clinton, who boasted of it nearly every day during his successful re-election race in 1996.
A former schoolteacher, Mr. Williams was also on the front lines of a conflagration over the National Endowment for the Arts. Conservative senators in 1990 sought to abolish the agency because of grants it had made that supported the photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, whose transgressive work was condemned by critics like Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association as blasphemous or obscene.
Mr. Williams was the chief author of a bipartisan compromise that preserved funding for the arts endowment while leaving decisions about obscenity to the courts. He became known as the savior of the N.E.A.
He was also the sponsor of a pet bill, the Professional Boxing Safety Act, which required safety standards for professional fighters. Congress passed it in 1996.
“Yeah, I fought as a kid in Butte,” Mr. Williams told The New York Times. “Back there you had to be a Democrat, and you had to be able to fight. Boxers are workers and deserve health protection.”
Alas, Montana has changed and it has changed 100% for the worse.