Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Nov. 16.
Photo:
Bryan Olin Dozier/Zuma Press
Families of 9/11 victims have been put through the wringer this year while pursuing compensation. A federal judge blocked one path forward, but Congress can open another with a legislative tweak and repurposed federal funds.
Senate Majority Leader
Chuck Schumer
is weighing a vote this month on the Fairness for 9/11 Families Act, a bill meant to settle the compensation saga. It offers back pay to about 5,360 relatives of victims who were previously excluded from the Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund, making up for payments they missed from 2017 to 2020. The awards in the bill are funded with $3 billion in unspent money appropriated for pandemic-era small-business loans.
The plan seems simple enough, which is why it passed the House 400 to 31 in September. Mr. Schumer told the Staten Island Advance last month that the bill “rectifies that original error and provides 9/11 spouses and children—as the victims of the worst foreign terror attack in American history—the funds they should have had access to from day one.” The GOP’s
John Cornyn
is among the Senate co-sponsors, and Mr. Schumer is eyeing a unanimous consent vote soon.
If it passes, the bill will help settle a monthslong fight. The Biden Administration in February dangled the prospect of a payment of similar size to a much smaller group of victims’ families, and in the process created a legal mess that Congress is now tidying up.
The process began when the Treasury Department froze the assets of Afghanistan’s central bank following the Taliban’s reconquest in 2021. With little apparent deliberation, President Biden ordered that $3.5 billion of that haul be disbursed to 9/11 families.
It was a fine idea in principle but included unfortunate fine print: A court ruling in 2011 had granted a tiny group of families a legal claim to the…
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