In April, four colleagues rarely in alignment—Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn of Texas, Chuck Schumer of New York, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut—jointly proposed a bill to give heirs to Nazi-looted art their day in court. The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act, now awaiting the attention of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is a federal solution to a problem formerly managed by the states. Judging by the diversity of its backers, it’s a solution that many in both parties will be eager to rally behind.

The recovery of Nazi-looted art is an untidy process of tracing provenance through the depths of only recently digitized databases. It’s functionally impossible without expert guidance. Those cases that have risen to wide public notice in the seven decades since the Holocaust have been ones of a certain grandeur. The best-known concern artworks looted from wealthy Viennese households, famous salons in the sparkling pre-Anschluss 1930s. Altmann v. Republic of Austria, also the subject of a popular book and movie, won for Maria Altmann five celebrated Klimts—a portrait of Altmann’s aunt, known as Austria’s Mona Lisa, among them—but only after years of Altmann’s lawyers battling hyper-regulation in her home state of California.