WASHINGTON -- It was Sept. 16, just a few days after the 14th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. Over the previous five months, sick and dying 9/11 responders had visited lawmakers offices on Capitol Hill hundreds of times, trying to get the Zadroga Act renewed. They arrived in wheelchairs, lugging oxygen tanks or inhalers, and stayed in the sorts of hotels where they once found crime scene chalk still marking the floor. Each day, they covered as many as 13 miles in the corridors of power as they begged legislators not to leave them, their families and their fellow responders without the resources to deal with their illnesses.

The responders knew it would be a tough battle when they began it in April. It had, after all, taken them 128 trips to the Hill to get the original James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act passed in 2010.

During that struggle, John Feal, a construction worker who lost half his left foot to an 8,000-pound chunk of steel on The Pile that had been the World Trade Center, threatened to make the 230-mile trip from New York City to Washington, D.C., on his bloody stump to get lawmakers attention. Little did he know that he and his fellow responders would end up logging many more miles than that inside the Capitol, and that then-"Daily Show" host Jon Stewart would be so appalled by the situation that he would devote his entire final broadcast of 2010 to their plight. Thats why people like former police officer Kenny Anderson turned out this year, with his lung capacity at 30 percent. Its why former firefighter Ray Pfeifer stepped up with stage 4 cancer that had cost him bones in his leg and rib cage.

But the second Zadroga Act hadnt advanced, even after five months of responders trying to get lawmakers to see them and understand what their service had cost. Only one of four relevant committees gave it a single hearing. The police officers and firefighters and construction workers were sicker and more disheartened than theyd been in 2010 -- some 33,000 people had developed 9/11-related ailments, including at least 4,166 cases of cancer; more cops had died of illnesses linked to the attack than had perished in it -- and the bill was on verge of lapsing.

So when Stewart returned to D.C. that day to walk the halls with the responders, and again use his bully pulpit to shame lawmakers in a very public way for failing to reauthorize an act that had been underfunded in the first place, they were especially grateful. And when the law was finally renewed -- permanently extending health care benefits for the responders and adding five years to the victims compensation program -- on Friday, after lapsing in September, they were grateful, too.

But the victory came at a cost. No one involved in the effort had thought too highly of Washington to begin with, but what Stewart and the responders saw and learned in the halls of Congress left them with the sense that the institution is even more deeply damaged than they had imagined.