<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><p class=""><i class="">Breaking with Democratic Party leaders, she argued that international trade agreements did little more than drain the United States of manufacturing jobs. When President Bill Clinton asked her to support the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), according to the Almanac of American Politics, she replied, “Why are you carrying George Bush’s trash?”</i></p></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/rep-louise-slaughter-liberal-democrat-who-championed-womens-rights-dies-at-88/2018/03/16/7b7f7c3e-2865-11e8-bc72-077aa4dab9ef_story.html?utm_term=.76722ea298a3" class="">https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/rep-louise-slaughter-liberal-democrat-who-championed-womens-rights-dies-at-88/2018/03/16/7b7f7c3e-2865-11e8-bc72-077aa4dab9ef_story.html?utm_term=.76722ea298a3</a><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div id="topper-headline-wrapper" class="col-xs-12 col-lg-9 col-sm-8"> <h1 data-pb-field="custom.topperDisplayName" itemprop="headline" class="">Rep. Louise M. Slaughter, N.Y. Democrat who championed women’s rights, dies at 88</h1></div></div><div class=""><div class="hasnt-headshot has-0-headshots hasnt-bio is-not-column pb-sig-line"> <span class="pb-byline" itemprop="author" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">By <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/harrison-smith/" class=""><span itemprop="name" class="">Harrison Smith</span></a></span> <span class="pb-timestamp" itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-03-16T10:40-500">March 16</span> <span class="pb-tool email"><a href="mailto:harrison.smith@washpost.com?subject=Reader feedback for 'Rep. Louise M. Slaughter, N.Y. Democrat who championed women’s rights, dies at 88'" class=""><span class="fa fa-envelope"></span><span class="envelope-label">Email the author</span></a></span> <span class="pb-bolt"></span> </div> <article class="paywall" itemprop="articleBody"><p class="">Rep.
Louise M. Slaughter, a folksy New York liberal who championed women’s
rights and American manufacturing for more than three decades as a
Democratic congresswoman, and who became a top lieutenant for House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the first and only woman to lead the powerful
Rules Committee, died March 16 at a hospital in Washington. She was 88
and the oldest sitting member of Congress.</p><p class="">The death was
announced by her chief of staff, Liam Fitzsimmons. Rep. Slaughter had
been hospitalized and treated for a concussion after falling at her home
in the District, The Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2018/03/14/rep-louise-slaughter-is-hospitalized-after-fall/?utm_term=.9b9672a94367" shape="rect" title="www.washingtonpost.com" class="">reported Wednesday</a> .</p><p class="">The
daughter of a blacksmith in a Kentucky coal mine, Rep. Slaughter traced
her lineage to Daniel Boone and attacked her political opponents with a
marksman’s accuracy and, not infrequently, a disarming grin. </p><p class="">“She’s
sort of a combination of Southern charm and backroom politics, a
Southern belle with a cigar in her mouth,” Jane Danowitz, executive
director of the Women’s Campaign Fund, told The Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/1992/05/10/women-on-the-verge-of-a-power-breakthrough/698ac34f-6a7a-4e80-aecd-8ddbc2b46f46/?utm_term=.baae2ac95de9" shape="rect" title="www.washingtonpost.com" class="">in 1992</a>.</p><p class="">A
microbiologist with a master’s degree in public health, Rep. Slaughter
moved to western New York with her husband in the 1950s and entered
politics two decades later, after fighting to preserve a stand of
beech-maple forest near their home in the Rochester suburbs.</p><p class="">She served in the Monroe County Legislature and New
York State Assembly before being elected to Congress in 1986 and soon
established herself as a defender of blue-collar constituents who worked
for Xerox or Kodak. </p><p class="">Breaking with Democratic Party leaders, she
argued that international trade agreements did little more than drain
the United States of manufacturing jobs. When President Bill Clinton
asked her to support the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),
according to the Almanac of American Politics, she replied, “Why are you
carrying George Bush’s trash?”</p><p class="">Initially one of just 29 women in
the House of Representatives, Rep. Slaughter was a flinty advocate of
women’s access to health care and abortion. </p><p class="">She was a co-author of the Violence Against Women Act, a landmark 1994 law aimed at <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-signs-a-strengthened-violence-against-women-act/2013/03/07/e50d585e-8740-11e2-98a3-b3db6b9ac586_story.html?utm_term=.265838bcd1cb" shape="rect" title="www.washingtonpost.com" class="">curbing domestic abuse and aiding its victims</a>.
In 1991, she was part of a group of seven Democratic congresswomen who
marched to the Senate to demand a delay in the confirmation of Supreme
Court nominee Clarence Thomas.</p><p class="">In a legislative assault she <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/anita-hill-and-her-1991-congressional-defenders-to-joe-biden-you-were-part-of-the-problem/2017/11/21/2303ba8a-ce69-11e7-a1a3-0d1e45a6de3d_story.html?utm_term=.02aca4566721" shape="rect" title="www.washingtonpost.com" class="">later likened</a>
to the World War II battle of Iwo Jima, she and her fellow legislators
prevailed on their Senate colleagues to hear testimony from Anita Hill, a
former Thomas aide who had accused him of sexual harassment. </p><p class="">“There’s no monolithic way that women respond to this,” she said <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/09/us/thomas-nomination-7-congresswomen-march-senate-demand-delay-thomas-vote.html" shape="rect" title="www.nytimes.com" class="">at the time</a>,
referring to the harassment allegations. “But we are the people who
write the laws of the land. Good lord, she should have some recourse
here.”</p><p class="">Rep. Slaughter was the ranking Democrat on the Rules
Committee, which determines when and how bills reach the House floor,
and, in 2007, served as chairman for four years after Pelosi became the
first female House speaker.</p><div class="inline-content inline-photo-left" style="width:300px;"><span class="pb-caption">Rep. Louise M. Slaughter, D-N.Y., in 2011. (Charles Dharapak/AP)</span> </div><p class=""> She successfully marshaled legislation that included an <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/15/AR2007091500589.html" shape="rect" title="www.washingtonpost.com" class="">ethics bill</a> to tighten lobbying rules and later spearheaded a bill banning <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/senate-passes-scaled-down-version-of-bill-to-ban-insider-trading-by-officials/2012/03/22/gIQAHAJ6TS_story.html?utm_term=.d468c61ef58d" shape="rect" title="www.washingtonpost.com" class="">insider trading</a> by lawmakers and their staff that became law in 2012.</p><p class="">Rep. Slaughter also co-legislation prohibiting <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-genetics-bush/bush-signs-genetics-anti-discrimination-law-idUSN2143439320080521?feedType=RSS&feedName=politicsNews" shape="rect" title="www.reuters.com" class="">discrimination</a>
on the basis of genetic information. The measure, which passed in 2008,
was designed to prevent insurance providers from rejecting coverage for
healthy people predisposed to cancer and other diseases.</p><p class="">Among
her greatest achievements was helping shepherd the passage of the
Affordable Care Act in 2010, during which she said she received a death
threat and her district office window was smashed with a rock. </p><p class="">She
remained nonchalant, however, even while inspiring Republican rage over
a short-lived proposal known as “the Slaughter Strategy,” in which she
considered passing the Senate version of Obamacare without an up-or-down
vote — a tactic, she noted, her Republican colleagues had sometimes
used themselves.</p><p class="">“We are about to unleash a cultural war in this country!” Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.) <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/20/AR2010032003224.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns&sid=ST2010032001699" shape="rect" title="www.washingtonpost.com" class="">told her at the time</a>.
Using an idiom she may have drawn from her upbringing in Kentucky, she
replied calmly, “I appreciate that you’re the bluebird of happiness.”</p><p class="">Rep.
Slaughter described herself as the only microbiologist on Capitol Hill,
and in recent years fought to establish stringent restrictions on the
use of antibiotics in healthy cattle — a leading factor, she argued, in
the rise of drug-resistant bacteria.</p><p class="">She often pointed toward a Food and Drug Administration <a href="https://www.fda.gov/downloads/forindustry/userfees/animaldruguserfeeactadufa/ucm231851.pdf" shape="rect" title="www.fda.gov" class="">report</a> that found that in 2009, out of all the antibiotics sold for use by people and livestock, 80 percent went to animals.</p><p class="">“These
statistics tell the tale of an industry that is rampantly misusing
antibiotics in an attempt to cover up filthy, unsanitary living
conditions among animals,” she told the New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/opinion/12kristof.html" shape="rect" title="www.nytimes.com" class="">in 2011</a>.
“As they feed antibiotics to animals to keep them healthy, they are
making our families sicker by spreading these deadly strains of
bacteria.”</p><p class="">Rep. Slaughter was unable to pass restrictive
antibiotics legislation. But her proposal, introduced in each
congressional session since 2007, helped draw national attention to the
issue. In 2015, President Barack Obama announced a $1.2 billion, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/03/27/white-house-announces-plan-to-fight-antibiotic-resistant-bacteria/?utm_term=.c64ff029a333" shape="rect" title="www.washingtonpost.com" class="">five-year plan</a> to identify emerging “superbugs” and increase funding for new antibiotics and vaccines.</p><p class="">Dorothy
Louise McIntosh was born in Harlan County, in southeastern Kentucky, on
Aug. 14, 1929. She graduated from high school in Somerset, about 100
miles west, and said she decided to pursue microbiology after her sister
died of pneumonia. </p><p class="">She studied at the University of Kentucky,
receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1951 and a master’s in 1953, and was
working in Texas when she met Robert Slaughter at a motel pool.</p><p class="">They married in 1957, and he died in 2014. Survivors include three daughters; seven grandchildren; and one great-grandson.</p><p class="">Rep. Slaughter took office after defeating one-term Republican Fred J. Eckert, arguing in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/11/01/the-risks-and-rewards-of-house-incumbency/5c6531b5-b61f-4612-8246-0a20af79162e/?utm_term=.21d16802fcb2" shape="rect" title="www.washingtonpost.com" class="">campaign ads</a>
that he had done little to help free Associated Press reporter Terry
Anderson, a Rochester native who was kidnapped by an Islamist group in
Beirut the previous year. </p><p class="">She won with 51 percent of the vote,
though she later said she was nearly defeated at the polls by sexism. “I
had a lot of women tell me their husbands just couldn’t vote for me,”
she told USA Today in 2007. </p><p class="">Her reelection campaigns grew
increasingly contentious as she entered her 80s, with some opponents
questioning her health and attacking her as a “Washington insider.” In
2012, she was sidelined from the campaign trail with a shattered leg she
suffered from a fall, though she boasted she had “the stamina of three
people” and would soon be back on the road.</p><p class="">Her hospitalization, she joked <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/nyregion/sidelined-by-a-broken-leg-louise-m-slaughter-holds-tight-to-election-hopes.html" shape="rect" title="www.nytimes.com" class="">to the Times</a>, had even given her an idea for a new campaign slogan: “Vote Louise. She has a leg up.”</p></article></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div class="">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; " class=""><div class="">Arthur Stamoulis</div><div class="">Citizens Trade Campaign</div><div class="">(202) 494-8826</div><div class=""><br class=""></div></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
</div>
<br class=""></div></body></html>