Jon Stewart is less than a week away from retiring from The Daily Show, but he’s already thinking about his next act: crusading this fall in Washington for the Sept. 11 first responders.

The Comedy Central star has promised to make a Capitol Hill trip as early as September to support a bill extending an expiring law that provides billions of dollars in medical health benefits for the police, firefighters and other emergency rescue workers who spent time at Ground Zero, as well as survivors of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Stewart committed to lobby the very lawmakers he’s made a career out of skewering during a backstage greenroom chat early in July with John Feal, an Army veteran and post-9/11 cleanup worker who is spearheading the advocacy push for the legislation. Feal told POLITICO that he expected Stewart to firm up the date for the visit after his final Daily Show appearance on Thursday.

“Everything he’s ever said, he’s kept his word,” Feal said.

The first-responders portion of the law, passed in 2010, is scheduled to expire this October but has enough money to run into next year. A separate fund for 9/11 survivors and first responders ends in October 2016. Supporters want to renew the whole law in perpetuity, like the health programs for coal miners who suffer from black lung disease, and the government workers and contractors who built the country's nuclear weapon arsenal. In early July on his program, Stewart called it “bullshit” that the 9/11 first responders even have to lobby to extend it, and demanded to know who on the Hill was blocking the effort.

“I want their names,” Stewart told Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the bill's primary author, during an interview with the New York Democrat on the show. Gillibrand remained diplomatic in the segment, not naming any specific opponents.

In his 16-year TV career, Stewart has put his shoulder behind a number of policy and political issues. He has put the spotlight on bureaucratic blunders preventing military veterans from getting health care, and is widely credited with CNN’s decision more than a decade ago to cancel an earlier version of the ‘Crossfire' talk show. Sensing his power with young voters, senior White House aides also cultivated relationships with Stewart and his staff, and the host even met twice privately in the Oval Office with President Barack Obama.

For Stewart, Sept. 11 has been an especially personal cause. He lived in an apartment overlooking the World Trade Center in 2001 and delivered a tearful opening monologue in his first show after the terror attacks, praising the firefighters, police officers and others who worked at the site “literally with buckets, rebuilding.”

For his final show of 2010, Stewart criticized the Senate Republicans filibustering a bill to set up the health program for the 9/11 first responders and survivors and who began experiencing a range of medical problems, from cancer to lung disease and post-traumatic stress disorder. Four of those post-9/11 workers suffering from serious illnesses were guests on the show.

Many advocates still credit Stewart with making the whole thing happen. After the segment aired, the Senate in the closing hours of its 2010 lame duck session ultimately approved a compromise five-year, $4.2 billion bill by a unanimous voice vote. House Democratic leaders about to relinquish their majority with the next Congress had to summon a couple of lawmakers back to Washington for the vote on final passage, which came about a week after Stewart's segment aired.

"We call him the Christmas miracle of 2010," said Scott Chernoff, a retired officer from the New York Police Department who was at the World Trade Center site on Sept. 11 and then spent about 300 hours working security at Ground Zero in its aftermath.

The bill Stewart is pushing for now would permanently extend health care and monitoring programs for the 9/11 first responders and survivors that are set to start expiring at the end of September, as well as the victim compensation fund. While money for the health care efforts won't run out right away, sponsors say that if they don't see movement by the end of 2015, medical professionals and clinics specializing in Ground Zero-related illnesses will likely start informing their staff of layoffs and other service terminations.

“We can’t just let this thing go,” said Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican partnering with Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney on the legislation. “It can’t wait until next year or the year after.”

With the threat of a second round of Stewart shaming hanging over the Capitol, advocates for the legislation say they are seeing signs of a much more bipartisan coalition than the 2010 effort. House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, for example, said during a June hearing that the 9/11 bill “needs to be passed" and the Michigan Republican said he'd try to get the legislation to the House floor before the end of September.

Fresh off a big bipartisan win in the Senate to rewrite the No Child Left Behind education law, Health Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander is also working on the issue with Gillibrand. An aide to the Tennessee Republican said he hoped to finish work on the bill after the August recess.

Advocates said they were picking up fewer signs of outright resistance than the first time in 2010. During a series of lobbying meetings earlier this week with multiple Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee, a panel with key jurisdiction over the 9/11 bill, Feal said several lawmakers and their staffs told him that while they wouldn't support the measure, they wouldn't stand in its way either.

For Gillibrand, King, Stewart and other advocates, their biggest challenge remains coming up with a way for the government to keep paying for the programs. They still don't have a final price tag for the bill, though they say it could surpass $10 billion. An "offset" that reduces government spending elsewhere to fund the 9/11 effort will be needed, and Gillibrand staffers have reportedly identified a source of money that they are reluctant to publicly share until the bill starts moving. They also face questions about whether the 9/11 bill should be approved for the life of all the first responders and survivors, or cleared for a shorter-term path that requires another act of Congress in a couple years.

“I don’t expect anything to be renewed in perpetuity,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican who met earlier this week with 9/11 first responders. While Issa said he expected a 9/11 bill to eventually make it into law, he said he wanted lawmakers to take a closer look at the existing program to make sure there hasn't been fraud or abuse.

“It’s a long time after 9/11,” Issa said. “And the last go around there were a number of possibilities for it being broader than we intended it to be….It would have allowed Woody Allen to get mental treatment, even though he wasn’t there on 9/11.”

So what does adding Jon Stewart to the mix mean for the legislation? He did not respond to a request for comment about the prospect of a Washington lobbying visit. But in his on-air interview in early July with Gillibrand, he joked about one of the more high profile GOP allies she’d won over — “Tom Cotton is doing the right thing and that guy is f------ nuts" — and hinted at what’s to come by promising to “schedule a ritual shaming” with her to call out any opponents of the bill.

"I obviously at that point will be knee-deep in, more than likely, grain alcohol,” Stewart said. "But for those who will still be functioning in our society I think that is something we should schedule and I promise to do it on my blog.”

King said the comedian provided "an extra dimension" in the 2010 effort, but the fellow New Yorker wasn't sure that Stewart attacking critics right now was the answer. "Before we start shaming, I think it's important to just remind people how serious it is," he said.

Other Republicans just shrugged off the potential for a celebrity lobbying campaign. “What Jon Stewart does I’d hope would never affect my vote in the slightest,” said Arizona Rep. Trent Franks, the chairman of a Judiciary subcommittee looking closely at the 9/11 bill. “I’ll shake hands and say ‘how are you, sir?’, listen politely and that’ll be in the end of it.”



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