Why the clock is ticking for survivors of nuclear testing

How race and identity are shaping politics, policy and power.

Apr 30, 2024 View in browser   By Gloria Gonzalez With help from Brakkton Booker, Ella Creamer, Rishika Dugyala,  Jesse Naranjo and Teresa Wiltz An image from July 1945 shows an aerial view after the first atomic explosion at the Trinity Test site in New Mexico. | POLITICO illustration/Photo by AP A gunman in North Carolina kills four police officers in Charlotte days before a scheduled visit from President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris travels to Atlanta to shore up support among Black voters, and former rivals Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis meet for the first time since the Florida governor suspended his presidential bid. Today, Gloria gets us started with a look at an impactful documentary with political implications.  In 1945, the United States detonated its first nuclear weapon during the Manhattan Project, at the Trinity site in New Mexico. The communities nearby — mostly low-income, mostly people of color — have been ravaged by cancer ever since. Their plights looked to be on the verge of changing in the last few months, as Congress weighed legislation to give people affected by radioactive contamination in states as varied as New Mexico and Missouri money to pay for the health care costs that have threatened to bankrupt so many of them. They had reason for optimism: Amid tense stalemates and political finger-pointing on Capitol Hill, a surprising Republican ally — Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri — emerged to corral enough GOP votes and bolster the support congressional Democrats secured over the years. But that progress hit a major bump in mid-April. Hawley and Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico teamed up on a bill to extend and expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which created a program to compensate people for health care and other costs related to atmospheric nuclear testing and uranium industry employment. But the original 1990 law left out communities that were downwind of the nuclear testing, those otherwise affected by the disposal of radioactive waste and underground uranium miners after 1971. After years of Republican resistance to reform, the effort to expand RECA’s scope is especially crucial now. The current statute will expire on June 7, and Congress has less than 20 legislative days to renew it. A bipartisan group of 30 lawmakers pressed the urgency in a letter sent Tuesday to House Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries asking them to pass the bill expanding RECA. “The government poisoned the air and water,” Hawley tells The Recast. “The government should clean it up.”   Was The Recast forwarded to you by a friend? Don't forget to subscribe to the newsletter here. You'll get a weekly breakdown of how race and identity are the DNA of American politics and policy.   Hawley and Luján’s proposed bill soared through the Senate on a 69-30 vote in March and awaits its fate in the House. But after a failed attempt to attach it to the $95 billion foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, an alternate bill proposed by Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee cropped up as a competitor. His version would extend the program as is — threatening to derail the effort to expand benefits to long-neglected communities. Lee also has a prominent co-sponsor in departing Sen. Mitt Romney while Rep. Celeste Maloy whips votes in the House. Both Romney and Maloy are Republicans from Utah. Mary Dickson, a thyroid cancer survivor who is lobbying to have her Utah community included in an expanded RECA, accuses Lee of “ignoring his own constituents.” A photo of the first atomic bomb test is displayed along a fence at the Trinity site at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, July 5, 2005. | Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images “RECA was always flawed, " Dickson says. “It never went far enough.” Lee’s office did not respond to requests for comment. The main concern opponents have about the expansion of coverage is simple: the price tag. A Romney spokesperson says the Hawley-Luján bill “drastically expanded the eligibility for benefits beyond the geographic center of the federal government’s Nevada Test Site and the list of diseases covered by RECA. Without clear evidence linking previous government action to the expanded list of illnesses, and a price tag north of $50 billion, Senator Romney could not support the legislation.” Hawley and Luján did cut the projected price from about $147 billion to roughly $50 billion, by trimming compensation levels for individual victims to cut costs. That move eventually won over some skeptics, like Missouri Republican Rep. Ann Wagner, who later sponsored the amendment that would have attached RECA to the foreign aid package. The strong support for their bill in the Senate reflects a rare moment of bipartisanship on the Hill, and close alignment with the White House, which has also thrown its support behind RECA’s extension and expansion. The fate of the legislation now rests mostly with one man: the embattled House speaker. Will Johnson allow a vote on a RECA bill in the dwindling legislative days before the law expires? Johnson’s office did not return requests for comment, but Hawley and Luján both say they expect the House to act — particularly given the strong bipartisan support for what they consider to be a no-brainer. “This is an American justice issue and it should be allowed to be voted on,” Luján tells The Recast. Hawley agrees: “It looks to me like Mike Johnson could use a win.” Monitoring of the radioactive fallout from the first nuclear test and subsequent testing has been limited, which affected how officials determined compensation under the original RECA. Various studies have attempted to quantify the health impacts. In 1997, the National Cancer Institute estimated that exposure from the Nevada tests would produce between 11,300 and 212,000 excess lifetime cases of thyroid cancer. A Princeton study released last year found the fallout of the Trinity test traveled a much farther distance than previously known, reaching 46 states within 10 days, concentrating in New Mexico in particular. All of this is explored in “First We Bombed New Mexico,” a documentary currently making the film festival circuit. Directed by Lois Lipman, the film tells the story of Tina Cordova and other “downwinders” who’ve been exposed to radioactive contamination. Cordova, who is Latina, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer when she was 39. She was one of the “downwinders'' exposed to radioactive contamination in New Mexico after the Trinity test, but wasn’t able to reap the benefits of RECA. Cordova tells The Recast she’s worried Lee’s straight extension effort would “sabotage” the expansion. If RECA sunsets, she said at a film screening in early March, “it will likely never be reinstituted and many people like the people in New Mexico will never see the justice that we so deserve.” Cordova and Dawn Chapman — co-founder of the Missouri-based advocacy group Just Moms, which works to protect families from Manhattan Project radioactive waste — have been on the Hill pushing for Hawley and Luján’s bill. Lawmakers have floated the idea of trying to attach it to the Child Tax Credit or push it through the House as a stand-alone. Cordova talks with reporters in her Albuquerque home in 2015. | Russell Contreras/AP In fact, Chapman’s been trying to get a meeting with Johnson’s office — though she says that process has been a “nightmare.” “If I could get 5 minutes in front of Speaker Johnson, I could get his support,” she says. ”I think he has a heart.” As always, we'll be watching to see how this all plays out. All the best, The Recast Team   VEEP TALKS BLACK ECON DEVELOPMENT IN ATL Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a separate event in March. | AP The vice president traveled down to Atlanta, which in recent years has come to be known as the “Silicon Peach,” to tout how the Biden administration’s policies have been a boon to minority economic investments. Our very own Brakkton Booker has a breakdown of the event. Kamala Harris, making her 12th visit to Georgia since becoming vice president, took the stage at the Georgia International Convention Center, where she was interviewed by Troy Millings and Rashad Bilal, hosts of the podcast “Earn Your Leisure.” The interviewers spent roughly 30 minutes taking turns lobbing softball questions to which Harris gave long-winded answers. But in the process they allowed her to play up key takeaways she hoped to impress upon the audience, including “bringing Black unemployment down to historic lows” and increasing access to capital to right systemic wrongs from decades-old policies that thwarted Black economic advancement. “During the late ‘50s and ‘60s there was this whole policy push, national policy push that was called urban renewal,” Harris explained. But instead, she said, legislation like the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 “bifurcated the community so that folks couldn't have easy access to … the small businesses from where they lived and it ended up decimating these communities for years.” An example of a solution to that displacement, Harris said, is “The Stitch,” an Atlanta project designed to reconnect city neighborhoods, creating greenspace, transportation enhancements and affordable housing, which is estimated to create some 13,000 jobs and generate millions in revenue. She also pushed back on conservatives who rail against colleges and universities looking to attract and maintain students and faculty from diverse backgrounds. “In spite of those who in certain parts of our country want to attack DEI, we understand that you can't truly invest in the strength of our nation if you don't pay attention to diversity, equity and inclusion,” Harris said. Georgia is a critical swing state that Democrats want to keep in their win column since flipping it in 2020. Prior to that no Democratic presidential nominee had won there since Bill Clinton did it in 1992. Harris said she is taking the tour, which will highlight the administration’s policies supporting Black businesses, to other cities in key battleground states with sizable African American populations, including Milwaukee and Detroit.   ICYMI @ POLITICO An aerial view of buildings destroyed by Israeli air strikes in the Jabalia camp for Palestinian refugees in Gaza City. | Yahya Hassouna/AFP via Getty Images Attorneys Call on Biden to Slash Military Aid — POLITICO’s Joseph Gedeon reports that a group of lawyers, both domestic and abroad, including some within the Biden administration, will send a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland stating Israel is violating U.S. and international statues, including humanitarian laws protected by the Geneva Conventions. Antisemitism Bill Clears House Panel — A Republican-led bill dubbed “H.R. 6090, the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023” cleared the House Rules Committee on Monday evening. POLITICO’s Bianca Quilantan reports that the bill has some bipartisan support, but Democrats including New York Rep. Jerry Nadler, said the measure “threatens to chill constitutionally protected speech.” All Publicity is Good Publicity? — Independent White House hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was in Boston on Monday fundraising at the same hotel “where he launched his quixotic presidential bid” roughly a year ago, POLITICO’s Lisa Kashinsky and Kelly Garrity report. They also add that recent attacks from the Democratic National Committee and from Donald Trump are making his supporters ecstatic. A Doggone Shame — South Dakota Governor and possible Trump vice presidential pick Kristi Noem is facing a barrage of criticism over revelations that she shot and killed a 14-month-old puppy because the aggressive pooch ruined a pheasant hunt and attacked her neighbor’s chickens, reports POLITICO’s Kierra Frazier.   THE RECAST RECOMMENDS WNBA player Brittney Griner gives her first interview about being detained in Russian prison tomorrow at 10pm on ABC. Rachel Khong untangles family secrets across three generations of Chinese Americans in her new novel, “Real Americans.” Bad Bunny answers an eclectic set of 73 questions for Vogue, discussing his first big purchase, the most underrated reggaeton artist — and whether he prefers dominoes or chess. Zendaya plays a tennis prodigy-turned-coach caught in a chaotic love triangle in “Challengers,” out in theaters now. Rooftop choreo is on point in Zico and Jennie’s earwormy collaboration, “Spot!” Ne-Yo takes to the NPR Tiny Desk, serving up R&B nostalgia with some of his classics and reminding us of the hits he wrote for other artists (Rihanna’s “Take a Bow”; Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable”). TikTok of the Week: Skip me please   Follow us on Twitter Brakkton Booker @brakktonbooker Rishika Dugyala @rishikadugyala Teresa Wiltz @teresawiltz Jesse Naranjo @jesselnaranjo   Follow us

To change your alert settings, please log in at https://login.politico.com/?redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.politico.com/settings This email was sent to rouf@idiot.cloudns.cc by: POLITICO, LLC 1000 Wilson Blvd. Arlington, VA, 22209, USA Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service