LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Linda Chase lives in California now, but she spent her formative years in Las Vegas, after her family moved here in 1955.
It was back then that Chase, a 1968 graduate of Western High School, and her friends, family and neighbors used to peer into the distance from their neighborhood to look at mushroom clouds in the distance.
The boundary of the Nevada Test Site — where atmospheric nuclear bombs were detonated beginning in 1951 — was only about 70 miles or so from Chase's childhood home and that proximity would come back to haunt her and her family members.
Chase says she contracted an autoimmune disease from radiation exposure as a child. Her father died of bladder cancer, one of the cancers outlined in the original Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, or RECA Act, which was passed in 1990.
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For decades, RECA has offered one-time compensation payments for established nuclear testing victims, but the legislation is set to expire on June 10. While the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would extend it, House leadership appears unwilling to bring a bill in that chamber to a vote.
"The ultra-conservative right wing has squelched this," Chase says. "Speaker Johnson is known to be very conservative."
That's House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican who seems to have put a road block up on any RECA vote. The gridlock has members of Nevada's Democratic delegation crying foul.
In a statement sent to Channel 13 on Tuesday, Sen. Jacky Rosen called for the House of Representatives to "swiftly pass" a RECA bill that is waiting for a vote before the legislation expires. Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, in a similar statement, said she's "disappointed" that the vote is being "held up" by House Republicans.
And Rep. Susie Lee, on Tuesday, called out Speaker Johnson by name, saying in a statement that he needs to "let us pass critical bipartisan legislation that will ensure funding for victims doesn't expire."
Members of the House are expected to leave Capitol Hill on Wednesday afternoon and representatives aren't scheduled to meet on Thursday in observance of the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landing at Normandy in World War II.
That means a vote is highly unlikely before RECA times out on Monday.
Any new claims for compensation by victims will need to be postmarked by June 10.
