Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said he was “very direct” with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell during a tense private meeting between the two Thursday evening in Washington.
He said the crux of the dispute is Hawley's insistence that people in his state who suffer from radiation exposure due to government activity around St. Louis during and after World War II still have health problems and deserve compensation.
Hawley wants to revamp a program to compensate them and people suffering in other states.
McConnell disagrees with the cost of the program.
Hawley recently asked his Senate colleagues to vote to reauthorize the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which would help Missourians who suffered health effects from radiation enrichment in their state that began during the Manhattan Project.
The senator said Thursday on his website that he recently found support from most of his Senate colleagues regarding reauthorizing the law to provide “critical funding” for “American victims of government-caused radiation.”
Hawley also said on his Page
Good news: It looks like we have an agreement to vote on RECA next week. It's time for Congress to act to help radiation victims https://t.co/hdmZ1vZy2e
– Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) February 29, 2024
The Hill reported Thursday that Hawley went to McConnell's Senate office to confront him about his opposition to the bill — which has bipartisan support among the Senate's 61 senators.
After the meeting, Hawley spoke to reporters outside and reminded them that McConnell had never complained about sending billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine, and that RECA had recently been removed from a larger defense spending bill.
“We had a discussion about RECA, and I told him straight to his face what I told you all, which was that I didn't appreciate that he talked him out of it. [National Defense Authorization Act]Hawley said.
The senator continued what he told McConnell:
“This is a direct insult to my state. There are thousands of people dying, and he is the problem, and I take that personally, just on behalf of my state, and that is unacceptable to me.”
Hawley added:[McConnell] I brought up the cost, and I said I didn't hear a lot of grumbling about the cost when we were voting on funding for Ukraine or anything else, for that matter.
“He called it an entitlement. I said this is not an entitlement, this is a compensation program for people who have been poisoned by the government.” “I was very direct.”
RECA will expire this spring, and McConnell will reportedly make no effort to block a vote to renew it.
As the Associated Press reported last July, there are ongoing efforts to clean up soil and water sources in eastern Missouri eight decades after Mallinckrodt Chemical Company first began enriching uranium for America's first atomic bomb program. Not only did former employees and their families suffer from rare cancers in the decades that followed, but people in the surrounding area also suffered from cancer and other diseases.
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This article originally appeared in The Western Journal.
