WASHINGTON — Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told a room of Navajo Nation members this week that the Radiation Exposure Compensation Reauthorization Act would pass by supermajority, but that the House speaker hadn’t “committed” to giving it a vote.
“’l just thank Speaker Johnson for being very involved,” Hawley said Tuesday at a press conference on Capitol Hill with representatives of the Navajo Nation held by himself, Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M) and Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), Reps. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-N.M.), Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) and Delegate James Moylan (R-Guam).
“Personally, the last few weeks, [Johnson] and I have had a number of very productive conversations. Now, to my knowledge, he hasn’t committed to anything, however, he hasn’t committed to putting anything on the floor,” Hawley said. “That’s what we need to see.”
Hawley said the current iteration of the extension of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), S.3853, is sponsored by himself, Lujan and Heinrich. It passed the Senate in March “by huge bipartisan margins,” Hawley said.
Enacted in 1990 to extend benefits to those affected by radiation from U.S nuclear weapons programs, RECA would have been signed by President Joe Biden (D) after it passed the Senate March, 69-30 vote.
But in June, on the day RECA expired after a two-year extension, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) sent the House home without a vote on Hawley’s extension.
Tuesday’s march on the Capitol, preceded by a morning briefing in a Navajo Nation office in Washington, was organized by a coalition of local Navajo groups and nonprofits: the Sawmill Diné Warriors, Southwest Uranium Miners Coalition Post-71, and Navajo Uranium Victims Committee, plus the Southwest Research and Information Center, an Albuquerque, N.M.-based antinuclear activist group. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based antinuclear nonprofit, helped promote the march.
“Pass RECA now!” chanted members of the New Mexico Navajo Nation, who said they traveled 37 hours by bus, missing chemotherapy treatments to march in the rain from Union Station to the Russell Senate Office Building.
One woman, unable to walk, traversed the streets of Washington in a wheelchair carrying a sign that read, “decades of cancer from nuclear testing, it’s time to pay the bills.”
Another woman, Mildred Chino, held a framed photograph of her husband who died of cancer after he was denied compensation from RECA.
“I come with a memory of my spouse’s voice, ‘Why? Why?’ Every time he got his denial letter,” Chino said, weeping. “I hope this bill passes, because I don’t want anyone else to go through the anguish and pain watching a strong man not be able to do anything anymore… Speaker Johnson, I hope you never witness the deterioration of a loved one due to illness, disease that you can’t help to cure.”
“I just remind my Republican colleagues, respectfully, I just remind them that if you go and look at a map and you look at the expansion that this bill would achieve, the justice this bill would achieve, most of the districts are actually Republican districts,” Hawley said at Tuesday’s press conference. “So I don’t really want to hear any more fussing from Republicans in the House about this bill. They benefit from it. Their people benefit from it.”
