Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., has pushed his first bill through Congress as a senator, securing a prominent National Mall location for a monument honoring the last surviving World War II Medal of Honor recipient, Hershel “Woody” Williams.
The Williams National Medal of Honor Monument Location Act places the National Medal of Honor monument within the Reserve on the National Mall. The Senate passed it unanimously in March, the House approved it Aug. 31, and it now awaits President Trump’s signature. Justice told Fox News Digital he expects Trump to sign it “this coming week.”
Williams, a West Virginia native, received the Medal of Honor for his actions during the Battle of Iwo Jima, where he used a flamethrower under heavy enemy fire to destroy Japanese positions and clear a path for advancing Marines. He died in 2022 at age 98 as the last living WWII Medal of Honor recipient.
Justice said the bill nearly died amid partisan gamesmanship before he personally intervened. “All we managed to do is keep a food fight going to where — because it was a Republican thing or Republican Jim Justice introducing — well, I’m telling you, if I’m a Democrat, by God, we’re not gonna let that happen and everything,” Justice said. “And then it’s just, it’s the same thing on both sides.”
A hallway conversation broke the logjam
The breakthrough came moments before Justice was set to bring the bill to the floor with four Medal of Honor recipients in attendance. He crossed paths with Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., a colleague on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
“I was about three feet from going into the Senate chambers,” Justice recalled. “And we sat down right there, you know, kind of on the steps and really just started talking.”
Justice said he leveled with Heinrich directly. “I don’t understand. I mean, how in the world can we do this?” he said he told him, warning that a floor fight “is not going to be good for you. It’s not going to be good for a lot of folks… a lot of people are going to be really sad.”
Heinrich’s response, according to Justice, cut to the heart of the Senate’s dysfunction: “He looked right at me, and he said, you know, people here don’t talk to one another. And I really appreciate you doing that, and I’m not going to object.”
With that, Justice said, the bill moved “in three minutes, boom, boom, boom, done.”
Justice calls for the Senate to “grow up”
Justice did not mince words about the state of the institution he now serves in. “I’ve never seen anything like this, never in my life seen anything to where it is, it is so preposterous,” he said. “I don’t know why we don’t talk to one another. I don’t know why we’re disrespectful to one other.”
He called the chamber’s habits “Romper Room behavior” and said lawmakers need to “absolutely grow up and let’s behave.”
Justice was blunt about why he believes the Senate stays gridlocked, pointing to the 60-vote filibuster threshold and a political class with little reason to disturb the status quo. “You’ve got a lot of people there that have never had a job,” he said. “They’ve been there forever, and they’ve never made a payroll.”
He recalled his former chief of staff, Brian Abraham, offering an even blunter diagnosis. “He looked right at me, and he said, ‘you don’t understand, do you? People here don’t wanna get something done. All they want to do is just keep it going. Round and round it goes. Fundraiser, fundraiser, fundraiser. Round and around it goes, get reelected, get re-elected.'”
Honoring a man who “was never about Woody Williams”
Justice, who knew Williams personally, said the fight was worth it precisely because Williams represented the opposite of self-serving politics. “Woody Williams was all about us,” Justice said. “Woody Williams was never about Woody Williams. And he just was an amazing man. I got to know him really well, and we became really good friends.”
Justice said he plans to bring his own descendants to see the finished monument. “I’m going to show them this and tell them, maybe I was only a grain of sand, but I had something to do with this. And I really stood up hard for it and everything. We got it done.”
