JUST FOUR MONTHS after the last American planes left the Kabul airport, Sen. Maggie Hassan‘s bill with Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) to erect a monument to the War on Terror on the National Mall has been signed into law.
The bill identifies potential sites on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. for a monument to those who died in Afghanistan, Iraq and other fronts of the 20-year war.
The monument bill was shut down in September, after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) worried it could open the door for too many new monuments or other developments on the National Mall, where nothing has been built since 2003.
But Hassan and Ernst worked to fold the bill into the annual defense funding package.
President Joe Biden signed off on the monument as part of the annual defense funding bill that also included a pay raise for service members, and hundreds of millions of dollars for the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.
“Our National Mall is a representation of our country’s history — the challenges we have faced and the sacrifices we have made for freedom,” Hassan said in a statement this week. “To not have a memorial to the brave men and women who fought in the Global War on Terrorism is inexcusable, and an injustice to our service members and their families who have given so much.”
“The time to honor these heroes of our nation’s longest war and their families is now,” Ernst’s statement read, “and there is no more fitting of a way to do that than with a memorial on our National Mall to serve as a permanent testament of their selflessness for generations to come.”
Death of a statesman
After the death Tuesday of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the only member of New Hampshire’s congressional delegation who served during his tenure, remembered Reid in a statement late Tuesday.
“Harry Reid was a statesman,” Shaheen said. “But more than that: he was a good man and a devoted public servant.”
Shaheen particularly praised Reid’s leadership through the 2008 recession and the passage of the Affordable Care Act on a razor-thin margin.
Most Granite Staters probably aren’t feeling Reid’s death too keenly. But the loss of his voice as Democrats consider the order of presidential primaries and caucuses means the loss of a strong critic of Iowa and New Hampshire’s positions.
“There’s no diversity,” Reid said in a 2020 interview with NBC. “It’s not right that 48 states should have to follow those two states, which are not representative of the country.”
Calling for report on child abuse
As the Biden administration prepares to submit the president’s budget proposal to Congress in the coming weeks, Hassan and five other Democratic senators are calling on Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland to ask for more focus and planning to combat child sexual abuse.
The letter, led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) criticizes the federal government’s response to rising reports of child sexual abuse images and commercial sexual exploitation of children as “tepid at best.”
The letter, perhaps predictably, blames the Trump administration for not prioritizing child abuse, and failing to “tackle its roots,” noting the former administration requested funding cuts for programs aimed at preventing abuse and trafficking of children.
The letter also notes that the Trump Justice Department did not make required annual reports to Congress about its strategy for preventing abuse, but said Congress has not received a report since 2016.
