Sen Jim Justice finds way through Senate polarization to bring WWII hero memorial to DC

Jim Justice getting a Medal of Honor recipient's memorial through the Senate by walking across the aisle and just talking to Martin Heinrich shouldn't be a headline. It should be Tuesday. But here we are, treating a five-minute hallway conversation like some rare astronomical event, because that's apparently what it takes now to name a monument after a guy who ran into machine gun fire on Iwo Jima with a flamethrower.

Woody Williams earned this. He didn't lobby for it, didn't have a super PAC, didn't need a hashtag. He held a valley on Iwo Jima against pillboxes for four hours and came home to work quietly for veterans for the next seventy years until he died at 98, the last of the Medal of Honor recipients from that battle. If a bill honoring that man needs a backroom save from a freshman-adjacent West Virginia senator sweet-talking a Democrat from New Mexico, something in the plumbing is broken.

Give Justice his due, though. He didn't hold a press conference about bipartisanship. He didn't write a op-ed about reaching across the aisle. He found the guy, made the case, and got it done, which is a dying art in a building full of people who'd rather post about gridlock than fix it. That's the actual lesson here, not some warm feeling about civility. The system is clogged enough that honoring a war hero requires a favor, and the fact that one senator still knows how to ask for one is the only reason this got across the finish line.

We'd like a Congress where this kind of thing passes on a voice vote without anyone needing to call in a chit. We don't have that Congress. What we have is one where a flamethrower operator from World War II needed a good old-fashioned handshake deal just to get a monument, and we'll take it, because the alternative was Woody Williams getting nothing at all.