David L. Williams

David Lewis Williams (born May 28, 1953) is an American attorney, politician, and jurist from the U.S. commonwealth of Kentucky. A member of the Republican party, Williams represented Kentucky's 16th Senate district in the Kentucky Senate from 1987 to 2012. When Republicans gained control of the chamber in 2000, Williams was chosen as President of the Senate, and held that post continuously until his resignation to accept an appointment as a circuit court judge.

Williams was the Republican nominee for the United States Senate in 1992, and for governor in 2011, but was defeated in each by wide margins.

Early life and family

The only child of Lewis and Flossie Williams, David Williams was born in Burkesville in Cumberland County, Kentucky, on May 28, 1953. Lewis Williams was a schoolteacher and basketball coach, but rural Cumberland County High School was unable to pay him sufficient salary to support his family; so he ran for clerk of the Cumberland County Fiscal Court. In his teenage years, he became affiliated with the Young Republicans. After graduation, he returned to Burkesville, where he began a law practice. The couple had no children.

State representative Immediately after finishing law school in 1977, Williams challenged the incumbent county judge in Cumberland County. In an election where a myriad of local issues resulted in ten incumbents in the House of Representatives losing their respective primaries statewide, Williams garnered 2,450 votes to Fryman's 1,804; a third candidate, Kirby R. Ringley, got 1,519 votes. With no Democratic challenger, Williams took the seat. At age thirty-one, he was the youngest member of the House of Representatives at the time.

As a member of the House, Williams served on the Education Committee. Williams opposed a provision of the plan that required county officials to raise additional tax revenue in order to participate in school construction program; he said that counties which were owed large amounts in delinquent taxes would have to raise tax rates above the state minimum in order to collect the requisite funds. All of Williams' amendments were defeated, except one to maintain the same qualifications for writing aides that were required of kindergarten aides. After the session, Williams and Representative John Harper charged that Collins delayed approval of public works grant projects in their districts in retaliation for their opposition to the reform plan; Collins denied that.

State senator

First term After only one term in the House, Williams announced his candidacy for the state senate in 1986. The seat, representing the 16th district (Adair, Casey, Cumberland, Green, Metcalfe, Russell and Taylor counties), was left open by the retirement of incumbent legislator Doug Moseley of Campbellsville. In the general election, he beat Democrat Willard N. Smith by a vote of 14,461 to 11,534.

In 1987, Williams was named the state organizational chairman for Vice-President George H. W. Bush's presidential campaign, and he was a delegate to the 1988 Republican National Convention. Also in 1988, he became the chairman of the Cumberland County Republican Party.

At the General Assembly's organizational session prior to the 1990 legislative session, Williams announced that he would challenge Jack Trevey for his position as Republican caucus chair. Williams lost his bid by a vote of 5 to 3.

The major issue of the 1990 legislative session was crafting a new, reformed school system due to a 1988 Kentucky Supreme Court decision that declared the entire Kentucky public school system unconstitutional. Although Williams was not a voting member of the Assembly's education task force, he regularly attended their meetings and contributed his input. When the Kentucky Education Reform Act was presented on the Senate floor, Williams supported it. Senate minority leader John Rogers was not among those who supported Williams and did not make the motion to seat Williams on the Legislative Research Commission, a seat to which Williams' position entitled him.

Second term After being re-elected in November 1990 without opposition, Williams challenged Rogers for the post of minority leader. The Republican Senate caucus, which gained three members in the 1990 elections, voted to retain Rogers, 6–5. Instead, Hopkins named Williams as his campaign manager. Hopkins defeated Larry Forgy in the Republican primary; Williams resigned as campaign manager following that primary. Williams and Huff were protesting the fact that Senator Tim Shaughnessy would not allow testimony about the bill. The suit was based on a non-binding advisory opinion issued in 1978 by then-Attorney General Robert L. Stephens which said that legislative rules could not contradict the state constitution, and cited a section of the state constitution, "Whenever a committee refuses or fails to report a bill submitted to it in a reasonable time, the same may be called up by any member."

A Franklin County circuit court judge ruled that the committee system was not unconstitutional and further, that lawmakers could not be sued for actions taken in their capacity as legislators because of the state constitution's doctrine of separation of powers. Williams and Philpot appealed to the Kentucky Court of Appeals who, in a 2–1 decision, stated that "We believe that the appellants have raised a significant question concerning the constitutional validity" of the Senate rules, but added the Court was "not inclined to resolve that question" before the end of the legislative session. The Court of Appeals asked for a full briefing and a hearing at a later date, but Williams and Philpot appealed to the Kentucky Supreme Court in order to force action before the end of the session.

During the 1994 legislative session, Williams opposed a bill to change workers' compensation because he said it was full of loopholes and did not reduce employer costs enough, which he claimed unnecessarily inflated the cost of doing business in Kentucky and cost the state jobs. An amendment offered by Williams that would have reduced the number of claims an employee could file was rejected. In the Republican primary, Williams faced opposition from Philip Thompson, executive director of the Kentucky Republican Party and a previous president of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, and Denny Ormerod, a machinist from Louisville who ran only a limited campaign.

In the general election, Ford, the Senate Majority Whip and a former governor, raised $2.4 million for his campaign, about eight times the amount Williams raised. Given his limited finances, Williams relied on news conferences and interviews on small town radio stations to get his message out. During the campaign, Williams attempted to paint Ford as too liberal for Kentucky voters, citing his votes against the Gulf War and Clarence Thomas' confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court. Both candidates declared their support for a Balanced Budget Amendment, but Williams said that Ford's support of pork barrel projects for the state and a procedural vote that kept the amendment from a vote in 1991 were evidence that Ford's support was not genuine. He was defeated in the Republican primary in May 1993 by his childhood friend, Fred Capps.

At the 1997 organizational session of the General Assembly, Senate Republicans, outnumbered 20–18, banded with four discontented Democrats from Eastern Kentucky to oust Senate President John "Eck" Rose in favor of conservative Democrat Larry Saunders. The dissident Democrats said that their region had been ignored by Senate leadership. Williams was the only Republican who did not vote for Saunders; having already promised his vote to Rose, he abstained after the alliance of Republicans and Democrats was revealed.

In 1996, Governor Paul E. Patton, a Democrat, named Williams to his Task Force on Postsecondary Education. The group was charged with devising ways to reform the state's system of higher education, including reducing the duplication of effort between the state's community colleges and technical schools. During the 1997 session, the Kentucky Center for Public Issues, a private, nonprofit public policy center, conducted a survey of legislators, lobbyists and journalists that showed Williams as the tenth most effective state senator, second among Republicans. The same survey showed Williams as the most admired Republican in the Senate.

In February 1998, Williams was a major player in a power struggle among Senate Republicans. In the middle of the legislative session, he led an attempt to replace Republican minority leader Dan Kelly. David Williams was regarded as a party moderate for, among other things, his vote in favor of the Kentucky Education Reform Act and its related tax increase; Gex Williams was a hard-line religious conservative who spent much of his career trying to repeal or weaken the Act.

In 1998, Gex Williams had entered the race to replace Jim Bunning as Fourth District congressman, David Williams backed Rick Robinson, his rival's primary opponent. When Gex Williams, who did not seek re-election to his Senate seat in order to run for the House, left the chamber at the end of 1998, David Williams blocked a resolution commending his years of service, a traditional honor for long-serving legislators.

In early 1999, weakened by the attempt to remove him as floor leader, Dan Kelly did not seek the post again at the General Assembly's organizational meeting. Williams declared his candidacy for the position, and ally Charlie Borders became a candidate for minority caucus chairman. Williams' leadership team was elected, and Democrat Larry Saunders was re-elected unanimously as President of the Senate. As minority leader, Williams negotiated an agreement with Saunders to allow Republicans to hold a majority in three Senate committees and to allow Republicans to chair those committees. The switch called into question how legislation would proceed through the chamber. Historically, the flow of legislation on the floor had been managed by the majority leader, but with an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, neither Williams nor Democratic floor leader David Karem could be considered the majority leader. Among the options considered were allowing Karem to retain control as before, allowing Williams and Karem to alternate control daily or weekly, allowing members of the chamber to choose between the two, or flipping a coin to determine who would be in control.

Following Leeper's switch, Williams announced that the Republicans, now in the majority, would oust Senate President Larry Saunders and elect a new president. Williams cited the party's deteriorating relationship with Saunders after he called a Democratic caucus meeting, held before Leeper's switch, in which Democrats pledged to block Republicans from exercising floor leadership during the upcoming legislative session. The move left Williams, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate and the third-longest serving members in the entire chamber, as Sauders' presumptive replacement. Martin won the Republican nomination after most of the party's potential high-profile candidates chose not to run, citing concerns that the state's campaign finance laws would make challenging an incumbent difficult.

President of the Senate, 2000–2012

On January 5, 2000, Larry Saunders' promised resignation became official, and Williams was elected President of the Senate. The transition was generally regarded as cordial and smooth, although Democratic minority leader David Karem asked that the Senate journal reflect that the shift in majority was due to party defection, not a vote of the people. Elements of the tax plan – in particular, a seven-cent-per-gallon hike in the gasoline tax – were considered unlikely to pass in isolation, and Williams and Richards believed Patton had bundled the budget and tax plan in order to make it harder for legislators to oppose these elements. Williams was able to hold his caucus together against tax increases until the last few days of the session, when they acquiesced on enacting a six percent tax on out-of-state phone calls. Late in the session, Williams accused Patton of approaching two unnamed Republican senators and asking them to vote with the Democratic caucus to oust him as Senate president. Patton acknowledged meeting with "more than two" Republican senators, but insisted that the legislators had initiated the meetings to express their displeasure with Williams' leadership and that he never asked them to help oust Williams. Patton claimed Williams had made a list of Republican senators who would support the increase, those who would oppose it, and those who might be persuaded to support it. Previously limited to 60-day meetings in even-numbered years, the Kentucky General Assembly was allowed a 30-day session in odd-numbered years by a constitutional amendment passed in 2000. As the 2001 session opened, the Republican-controlled Senate and Democrat-controlled House clashed over the makeup of joint committees that meet in the interim between legislative sessions to study issues and draft legislation for the upcoming session. Senate Republicans called for equal representation on the committees to reflect their control of that chamber; Democrats insisted that, because the House had more members, the House should be represented by more members on the joint committees.

One of the items left unaddressed in the 2001 legislative session was approving a redistricting plan for the state based on the 2000 Census. Republicans advocated for Governor Patton to call a special legislative session following the 2001 regular session for the purpose of considering redistricting, but Patton refused to call such a session unless House and Senate leaders had an agreed-upon plan in place first. They asked that the Census Bureau release scientifically adjusted figures that would account for those underrepresented populations.

In the opening days of the 2002 General Assembly, House Democrats angered Senate Republicans by submitting maps of proposed districts for the House and Senate. Previously, each chamber had only submitted maps for its own districts. After weeks of negotiations, the Assembly approved a plan that gave House Democrats most of what they wanted with regard to House districts and Senate Republicans most of what they wanted with regard to Senate districts. After Senate Democrats complained about the bill, House Majority Leader Greg Stumbo chided them for "not [accepting] the fact that 20-18 means Republicans control the Senate" and encouraged them to campaign hard to win back the chamber in future elections. He selected incumbent state agriculture commissioner and former Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball player Richie Farmer as his running mate.

Williams was defeated by incumbent Steve Beshear, ultimately garnering 294,034 votes (35.3%) against Beshear and Gatewood Galbraith, an independent perennial candidate who garnered nine percent of the vote.

Circuit judge Late in 2012, a seat on the Kentucky 40th Circuit Court, which includes Cumberland County, opened up when Eddie Lovelace died from a fungal infection apparently caused by tainted steroid injections. Williams was named to the three-person shortlist for the seat and was officially appointed by his former political rival, Governor Beshear, on October 26. Williams accepted the appointment, and formally resigned from the Senate on November 2.