After weeks of withering criticism from comedian Jon Stewart, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell guaranteed on Friday that a health care bill for 9/11 first responders will be included in a must-pass, year-end spending deal.

Stewart has barnstormed Capitol Hill and blanketed the media, including his old show this week, in an all-out lobbying campaign for the roughly $8 billion measure.


In an interview with POLITICO on Friday, McConnell shrugged off the negative attention he’s attracted over the expiration of the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. But the Senate leader said unequivocally that the legislation viewed as critical to caring for first responders will be approved by the end of the year.

“Everybody’s for it. It’s going to be included,” McConnell said.

The 9/11 responders plan is wrapped up in negotiations over a massive spending package and expiring tax breaks. McConnell said Congress will not leave for the holidays until a deal is reached. The Senate and House this week passed a five-day funding extension, pushing the deadline to clinch an agreement to the middle of next week.

“We’re certainly going to finish, both that and the tax bill,” McConnell said. “All of those discussions are continuing.”

Stewart has been on a warpath for the bill to help 9/11 responders, many of whom suffer from cancer and other health ailments. On Monday, he returned to "The Daily Show" and singled out McConnell, accusing him of caring about little "other than politics” after Democrats posited that the GOP leader was using the Sept. 11 legislation as a bargaining chip on a transportation bill.

"So far, he has been an enormous obstacle, unwilling to move the bill forward for purely political reasons," Stewart said. "He's not nice."

McConnell's office said the Republican leader always intended to back the bill, regardless of Stewart.

Earlier this month, Stewart and a group of first responders confronted senators and top congressional aides over the issue. Senior McConnell staffers have been frequently engaged with those first responders over the matter.

“Everybody’s for it. It’s going to be included,” Mitch McConnell said.

Asked whether Stewart’s advocacy has been productive, McConnell said Congress always planned to address a victims compensation fund that’s expected to expire next year as well as the World Trade Center Health Program, which expired in October.

Earlier this week, McConnell said it was “not true” to say that he’d personally advocated to remove the provision and that more work needed to be done to the health care bill. He said he supported the measure.

“Everybody was for it. This is a worthwhile cause and we’ll take care of it,” McConnell said in the interview.

As of Friday, lawmakers were still negotiating how to finance the package, aides said. Some Republicans have been reluctant to sign on to the legislation without finding a way to pay for it; Stewart called it hypocritical for Congress to restore $3 billion for crop insurance last week as part of a transportation bill, while shirking health care for first responders.

On Thursday, New York Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand brought New York Police Commissioners Bill Bratton to discuss the plight of the first responders. Schumer said “the lives of our first responders is not a bargaining chip”; Gillibrand called the lack of urgency “shocking.” And Schumer said simply that there is no deal yet on the legislation.

Advocates say that 33,000 first responders and 9/11 victims have medical conditions as a result of Sept. 11 and face imminent loss of care without action. The legislation being discussed would make many of the programs that aid Sept. 11 first responders permanent, avoiding a painful return to the emotional topic of caring for those who risked their lives at the World Trade Center, responding to the attacks.

In his "Daily Show" appearance this week, Stewart reconvened a panel of first responders from five years ago, when Congress also waited until the last minute to pass the health care coverage. Just one of them was there: retired New York City Fire Department firefighter Kenny Specht. Two were too sick to make the taping and one has died in the intervening years.