Just a few months after his retirement, Jon Stewart made a visit to “The Daily Show” on Monday to talk about a health care act for 9/11 emergency responders that he had helped champion when he hosted the program.
Mr. Stewart, who stepped down in August from “The Daily Show,” the Comedy Central news satire he had hosted for more than 15 years, popped up in the second act of the program, now hosted by Trevor Noah. “I’m sorry, sir,” Mr. Noah joked. “Are you — are you lost?”
Mr. Stewart, dressed casually and sporting a silver beard, said that he was not there to take back the show, but to talk about an issue that he cared about “very deeply, and I want to get some attention paid to it.”
That issue, Mr. Stewart said, was the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, which provides health care funding and compensation for emergency workers who were sickened by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and their aftermath. The act passed Congress in 2010, was signed into law by President Obama and went into effect the following year. Portions of the act expired after Sept. 30, and the rest of it will expire by next October unless it is renewed.
Mr. Stewart said there was “no reason not to renew it permanently, but they did not renew it anyway.”
“It’s soon going to be out of money,” Mr. Stewart said. “These first responders, many sick with cancers and pulmonary disease, have had to travel at their own expense to Washington, D.C., hundreds of times to plead for our government to do the right thing.”
“The only conclusion that I can draw,” he added, “is that the people of Congress are not as good a people as the people who are first responders.”
A taped segment of the program showed Mr. Stewart traveling with emergency workers to Washington “to see if shame works,” he explained. An on-screen graphic showed a list of several United States senators who had not supported legislation to renew the Zadroga bill, but who had posted messages on Twitter saying they would not forget the 9/11 attacks.
Mr. Stewart was shown visiting the offices of Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky; Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin; and Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, but encountering only their staff members and aides.
“These guys are all dying,” Mr. Stewart told a woman identified as “Rob Portman’s communications director.” “So we would like to stop that.”
Mr. Stewart did later encounter Mr. Portman, who told him: “We’ll let folks know, as I have already, that I support it. The question is, let’s find a way to pay for it.”
In a voice-over, Mr. Stewart said, “That night, Senator Portman of Ohio signed onto the bill. So maybe shame does work.”
Mr. Stewart appeared on the show again, in the third act, to call the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, “an enormous obstacle, unwilling to move the bill forward for purely political reasons.” Mr. Stewart said that Mr. McConnell was exacting revenge “when he didn’t get concessions about loosening oil-export regulations.”
Mr. McConnell said last week that he supports the bill and wants its health program permanently extended. He said that he was willing to add it to a larger, omnibus spending bill but that Congress still needed to find funding for it.
Mr. Noah reminded Mr. Stewart that, in 2010, he had hosted a panel of emergency responders on “The Daily Show” to advocate the Zadroga Act, and suggested that Mr. Stewart get that panel back together.
Mr. Stewart then stepped away to another set where only Kenny Specht, a retired firefighter was sitting. When Mr. Stewart asked where the other members of the panel were, Mr. Specht said that two of them had illnesses, and a third had died.