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WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans are poised to kill the 9/11 health bill with a filibuster today, crushing hopes of New York lawmakers who call the vote “the last, best chance” of passing the legislation this year.
The long-suffering legislation got a temporary reprieve in the Senate last night when the filibuster vote was postponed until this morning.
The bill’s dire fate, however, appeared all but certain, said sources close to Senate Democrat leaders and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who championed the bill.
Republican Sens. Mark Kirk of Illinois and Olympia Snowe of Maine — to whom supporters looked for the crucial two GOP votes needed to pass the long-stalled bill — said they planned to join the rest of their caucus for the filibuster.
All 42 Republicans vowed last week to block every piece of legislation until Democrats approve the deal to extend all the Bush tax cuts.
Snowe said she was considering supporting the bill but “not before we deal with the tax bill.” She would have been the final GOP voted needed to break the filibuster and advance the legislation toward an easy vote for passage.
Kirk, who earlier committed to support the bill, also has pledged to block any legislation until the tax deal is finished — and he is ready to vote against the 9/11 bill today.
The senator “absolutely supports the bill but will stick to the GOP agreement in the letter on those cloture votes,” a source close to Kirk told The Post.
The bill, titled the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, needs 60 votes to pass. All of the chamber’s 58 Democrats are expected to support it.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) yesterday appealed to Republicans to make an exception for the $7.4 billion bill to give federal medical benefits to first-responders who got sick from Ground Zero dust.
“This is nothing we should play politics with, just like we don’t play politics with veterans’ needs,” Schumer said on the Senate floor.
“It is not fair and it is not right to say, ‘We will not remember these people who volunteered and risked their lives to protect our freedom in a time of war — we will not help them until X or Y or Z gets done.’ Not fair. Not right,” he said.
But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) slammed Democratic leaders for bringing up the 9/11 bill and other measures as “show votes” — knowing they would fail but looking to score political points, he said.
Gillibrand and other supporters held out hope that the bill would get enough Democrat support — maybe all 58 votes — to put pressure on the leadership to bring it to the floor again before the end of the lame-duck session.
A Democratic leadership aide said anything was possible, but the vote today is “the last, best chance of this happening this year.”
The bill languished in Congress for nine years before winning House passage in September.
The Zadroga bill was named after the NYPD officer who responded on 9/11 and later died of respiratory disease that was the first case attributed to exposure at Ground Zero.
But the cause of death was disputed by the city Medical Examiner’s Office, which in 2007 determined Zadroga died from injecting ground-up prescription drugs.