Brendan Williams

Former legislator, attorney, health care advocate, author

Brendan Williams is an attorney, health care advocate, and a prolific writer running a long-term care association in New Hampshire.

The only Washington legislator to keep a term-limits pledge, from 2005-10 Brendan served Thurston County’s 22nd Legislative District as a state representative.  He earned top-legislator recognition from nine statewide groups, ranging from progressive to conservative, and from 2007-08 passed the 3rd-most bills into law in the 98-member House.  In his spare time, from 2005-12, Brendan was a frequent debater on statewide ballot measures before editorial boards and on radio and TV.

Over six years, the 27 bills Brendan prime-sponsored into law included some that were nationally-groundbreaking.

Nine highlights:

• Safeguarding insurance for religious institutions and health clinics targeted by crime, after arson hit churches and an Olympia women’s clinic
• Creating sexual assault protection orders
• Establishing the Safe Routes to School Program within the transportation budget
• Allowing victims’ pets to be removed from abusers in domestic protection orders
• Requiring negligent businesses to cover data breach costs for financial institutions
• Preventing governments from interfering with religious institutions housing homeless
• Integrating Child Advocacy Centers into investigation of child sexual abuse
• Granting arbitration rights to State Patrol officers
• Allowing adult family home providers to collectively bargain for higher Medicaid reimbursement

More whimsically, when children at Boston Harbor Elementary School wanted there to be a state amphibian, Brendan pushed their bill into law bestowing that designation upon the Pacific Chorus Frog.

No three-term “safe district” legislator passed more bills into law than Brendan did.  He was selected as a Toll Fellow — one of 40 national rising stars — by the Council of State Governments and spent his fellowship in Kentucky, where then-Gov. Fletcher named him a Kentucky Colonel.

In 2006 the Spokesman-Review wrote that Brendan “takes the prize for most fundraising by a legislator assured of victory on Election Day.”   Allowing for adjusted contribution limits, Brendan’s record still stands for biggest “surplus” donation by a freshman Democrat to help other candidates, and no legislator ever gave more personally.  As a representative he served in many capacities as needed, including as Majority External Relations Leader and as a leading voice for House Democrats on 2006 sex crimes legislation.

With 123 state legislative races on the ballot in his final race in 2008, Brendan received the 4th-highest vote total of any winning candidate in the state, and yet kept his term limits promise.  In 2010, the Olympian referred to him as “Olympia’s iconic” legislator.  He was recognized for his unwillingness to yield to orders, and for speaking up on behalf of vital programs, including Medicaid, cut during the panicked 2009-10 response to the recession.  Brendan described the 2009 session in the Olympian as “an unending assault on the people and values of the 22nd District.”

In 2010, as cuts continued, Brendan fought alongside Republicans to try to save an institution in an adjoining Republican district.  He also sought to apply the same pay cuts to legislators that they were inflicting upon state workers, including their own largely-female legislative aides.  That effort failed in a close House vote.  Author of an anti-harassment order law, Brendan reported a fellow majority Democratic colleague’s alleged workplace sexual harassment to House administration in 2010 despite an explicit threat of reprisal.  The information was concealed (and the alleged perpetrator actually promoted in leadership) before years later being uncovered by the New York Times. In contrast, House administration had quickly acted on Brendan’s 2010 reporting of a Republican colleague’s alleged harassment.

The incident, and its aftermath, inspired Brendan’s 2019 article in the Marquette Benefits and Social Welfare Law Review on workplace concealment of sexual harassment and other bad acts.

In the 2008 gubernatorial election, a then-extremist group closely-allied with the Democratic House speaker called Gov. Christine Gregoire a “power-hungry she-wolf.”  Williams publicly condemned the organization, its sexist attacks on Gregoire, and its attacks on Seattle, while the speaker, from Seattle, remained silent.

When military families and others brought concerns to Brendan’s attention about construction defects in their new homes in his fast-growing district Brendan worked to give buyers of new homes the legal remedies every other state provides. His push was popular with consumer advocates and editorial pages, and supported by a TV news investigation and KOMO News commentator Ken Schram, yet the House speaker refused to allow a vote. The saga is recounted in a law review article.

Upon taking office in 2005, Brendan had to give up his position as head of the Washington Health Care Association. The association enjoyed record success during his tenure, despite massive proposed long-term care cuts in successive sessions, as Brendan worked to block cuts, and actually obtained Medicaid funding gains in both sessions from a Republican Senate and Democratic House.   His legal arguments also persuaded the state to stop imposing retroactive tax liability upon assisted living; in a settlement Brendan negotiated a law reducing the tax to 1/6 of what the state sought, and made it prospective only.

Care for the most vulnerable is a passion: Brendan has had over 170 op-eds on long-term care published in one Pennsylvania newspaper, three Iowa newspapers, six Washington newspapers, and eight New Hampshire newspapers.  He has also had dozens more op-eds on other topics, including advocacy for those with hearing disabilities, and columns on the Washington state constitutional duty to fund education for public school kids.

Brendan’s thoughts on health care have been featured nationally, including, for a time, in regular op-eds in The Hill, and in two USA Today op-eds. He contributed photos to a New York Times'‘ expose on the shortcomings of federal personal protective equipment distributed to nursing homes during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and was quoted there, and by ABC News, Guardian and Washington Post, and other outlets on COVID-19 and its repercussions. Brendan’s outraged demonstration of how a federally-supplied disposable isolation gown looked like a garbage bag drew national attention in an Associated Press story with a photo — a photo that even appeared in AARP Magazine — and forced the federal government to stop distributing these insulting items that further marginalized the nursing home workforce.

Brendan was quoted in the New York Times’ bestseller An American Sickness by Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, and, in another New York Times’ bestseller, author Thomas Frank acknowledged that “Brendan Williams explained Obamacare to me.”  A former Washington Supreme Court law clerk, described by Washington’s longest-serving Chief Justice as “one of my finest law clerks,” Brendan has authored 44 law review articles accepted for publication on a range of issues, including civil rights, consumer rights, criminal justice, health care, insurance, gender identity, the judiciary, and women’s rights. One of Brendan’s articles was even cited in the December 2022 report by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

Other work experience includes a six-year solo legal practice, two-and-a-half years as a deputy insurance commissioner, and a jet-setting stint as general counsel to a national trade association based in Alexandria, Virginia.   Brendan has been a frequent speaker on health care and insurance topics at national conferences and continuing legal education seminars.

A product of public schools, Brendan earned degrees from The Evergreen State College (B.A.), the University of Washington School of Law (J.D.), and Washington State University (M.A., Criminal Justice). While Brendan was an undergraduate, the student governments of the state’s five public universities elected him president of the Washington Student Lobby.  As a child Brendan lived in the Evergreen Villages’ low-income housing complex in West Olympia before moving to Oregon and Iowa and spending vacations with his father in Olympia, during which he swam in Capitol Lake before that became impossible.

Away from work and writing, Brendan is a very proud dad and avid hiker.  Active in philanthropy, he funds annual community college scholarships in the memory of Janice & Earl Kurtis Sharar, his late aunt and uncle, and Evalyn Poff, a pioneering woman leader in Olympia.