Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who scored a big win by getting Senate GOP leaders to add language extending the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) to President Trump’s budget package, is challenging Democrats not to contest the provision with the Senate parliamentarian.
Hawley noted the bipartisan support behind RECA in urging Democrats to not challenge its presence in the Senate version of Trump’s tax and spending bill.
“Democrats will soon have to decide whether to try to strop RECA out of the reconciliation bill (using the ‘Byrd rules’). It stays in unless Democrats challenge. Don’t do it! Survivors have waited too long. Let’s get this done now!” Hawley posted on the social platform X.
Hawley announced last week that GOP leaders agreed to include the largest expansion to date of the radiation exposure compensation program in President Trump’s signature first-year legislation.
It would expand the program to make residents affected from radioactive exposure in Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alaska eligible for compensation and would fully cover people affected in “downwind” areas such as Nevada, Utah and Arizona.
“The federal government dumped nuclear waste in the backyards of Missourians for decades—and then lied about it. These survivors sacrificed their health for our national security at the advent of the Manhattan Project, and their children and grandchildren have borne the burden of radioactive-linked illness for generations since,” Hawley said in a statement last week.
Hawley is challenging Democrats who have supported the expansion of RECA to urge their leadership not to attempt to strip the language from the budget reconciliation package by litigating the issue with the Senate parliamentarian.
Democrats are challenging an array of provisions in the massive package as violations of the Senate’s Byrd rule, which governs what legislation may be protected from filibusters under the budget reconciliation process.
Democrats have already successfully knocked out several provisions, such as a funding cap that would have eliminated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a key accomplishment of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act.
The expansion of RECA has had strong bipartisan support in the Senate.
Hawley joined Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) and Democratic Sens. Martin Heinrich (N.M.), Ben Ray Luján (N.M.) and Mark Kelly (Ariz.) in January to reintroduce the Radiation Exposure Compensation Reauthorization Act to compensate Americans exposed to radiation by government nuclear programs.
Heinrich said at the time that “it’s long overdue for Congress to pass an extension and expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act that includes Tularosa Basin Downwinders whose communities and families were harmed by the fallout of the 1945 Trinity Test.”
The Trinity Test, which took place in July 1945 at the Alamogordo Bombing Range in New Mexico, was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon as part of the Manhattan Project.
Luján, when he joined Hawley in reintroducing the legislation in January, said that “individuals affected by nuclear weapons testing, downwind radiation exposure and uranium mining are still waiting to receive the just they are owed.”
A Democratic aide on Friday declined to say whether Democrats would challenge specifically the RECA language championed by Hawley. The source said Senate Democratic staff are conducting a comprehensive review of policy provisions in the package.
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