Pat Williams, Last Montana Democrat to Serve in the House, Dies at 87
Pat Williams, a retired Montana congressman whose left-leaning politics were forged in the hard-rock mining town of Butte, and who, to date, was the last Democrat to serve in the House of Representatives from Montana, died on Wednesday in Missoula, Mont. He was 87.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by his family.
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.
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