Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley has waged a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style battle to get compensation for continued victims of WWII-era nuclear waste exposure in the St. Louis region. And he’s still working the Senate to get it done, before the aid law expires next month.
But now he’s looking to his colleagues over in the House for help – as the lower chamber has failed to act on Hawley’s aid package that has already passed the Senate twice.
Time is running out, as is his patience.
Hawley has now announced an effort to get his extension/expansion of the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) attached as an amendment to the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill working its way through the Senate.
“Listen, I’ll try to put it on anything that I think will force the House to act,” Hawley told The Heartlander in an exclusive interview Thursday. “The order of the day is to force the House to act. I mean, whatever it takes. So if it’s not [the FAA bill], I’ll look for something else.
“But at the end of the day, the close of business here, the House has got to pass this bill. They have to. If they don’t, Missourians will continue to get nothing, they will continue to be lied to, the nuclear waste will not be cleaned up. And the same will be true for millions of other Americans.”
The original law, which is set to expire in June, didn’t even include radiation victims in Missouri left by atomic bomb processing here, but they’re out there. Hawley told the stories of 11 of them in January – including that of 5-year-old Zoey, who had to have a mass removed from her ovary at just 3 weeks of age and who had just recently returned to the doctor for continued severe pain.
Hawley’s RECA reauthorization would extend the expiring federal compensation for medical bills and such, and expand it to Missouri as well as states such as Alaska, Kentucky and Tennessee, as noted by an extensive Fox News feature by anchor Bret Baier.
The Heartlander asked Hawley whether the attention from Fox News moved the needle at all in the Senate or House or elsewhere.
“Well, I hope so. We passed it twice in the Senate – and the House, they’re the problem. And I would just say to the House, here’s a suggestion: Why don’t you take a day off from your food fights and actually do something for the American people for a change? Do something for the people of Missouri. These are working people who have proudly served this country, and their government lied to them. Make it right.
“They can make it right. But the House has got to pass this bill, and they’ve got to do it now.”
