President-elect Trump, during a celebrated moment of his campaign last year, clapped on a hard hat and promised a crowd he would take care of coal miners. Now, West Virginia Sens. Joe Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito are counting on him to keep his word.
The pair of lawmakers, along with several others from coal-producing states, are determined to help more than 22,000 retired miners and their widows who will lose healthcare benefits next year if Congress doesn’t act quickly.
Manchin, a conservative Democrat, and Sen. Sherrod Brown, a more liberal-leaning Democrat from Ohio, threatened to shut down the government in early December over the miners’ healthcare issue until they secured a promise that the Senate would pass a longer-term fix to the vanishing benefit from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
More than 3,200 retired miners in Kentucky will lose healthcare benefits and another 9,600 are at risk of losing them, along with their pensions. McConnell provided a short-term stop-gap extension of the healthcare benefits until April in the end-of-year spending bill, and in late December publicly said he would seek a “permanent fix” to save the depleted healthcare program in the new year.
Manchin doesn’t know if McConnell plans to use the bipartisan bill he wrote with Capito, a Republican, as the solution, but he’s gratified by the GOP leader’s commitment.
“He told me when we came back he would work for us to try to fix this,” Manchin told the Washington Examiner. “We can’t keep using a Band-Aid to try to fix this. These people worked hard for our country, risked their lives and they got screwed over.”
Manchin said he’s discussed the problem with Trump and was encouraged by his desire to help.
“I spoke to President-elect Trump about this and said you have to get involved. You look at coal country — some 70 percent went for him,” Manchin said. “He said he wants to help them. … I believe he really wants to, and that would be welcome news from what we’ve been dealing with so far” with the Obama administration’s coal regulations.
Manchin and Capito’s bill, the Miners Protection Act, would prevent tens of thousands of miners, retirees and their widows, from losing both their healthcare and pension benefits after dozens of coal-mining companies declared bankruptcy in recent years. The coal industry also has been hit on several other fronts, including Obama administration regulations, low natural gas prices, as well as lower demand for the coal involved in steelmaking.
The Senate Finance Committee passed the measure 18-8 in September, but it stalled afterward. The proposal would reallocate excess federal funds from an abandoned mine land restoration program Congress designated in 2006 to the retired miners’ healthcare program. The bill also aims to make the United Mine Workers of America union pension plan solvent by using the remainder of the unspent money from the mine land restoration program.
Manchin and other advocates argue that the effort to replenish the funds would keep promises made to coal miners in 1946 by then-President Harry Truman to avoid a miners strike and help the economy get back on track after World II.
Opponents, including the Heritage Foundation, argue that it would amount to a government bailout of union pension fund to the tune of $490 million a year and create a precedent for government intervening and trying to save the day for billions of dollars in other troubled unions’ pension programs.
Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., has called the rescue a “slippery slope,” arguing it would do nothing to help nonunion miners in Wyoming.
Manchin said the argument is “just wrong” because nonunion miners in western states are feeling the impact of these bankruptcies in traditional coal country and states like his.
“I am sympathetic to the nonunion miners as anybody,” he said. “But what they have to understand, if it hadn’t been for this strike being settled in 1946 and all the work that coal miners did for the [nation’s energy and infrastructure], you wouldn’t have the country you have today.”
He blamed Congress for stepping in during the 1980s and screwing up the pension programs by allowing all companies to declare bankruptcy and forfeit the responsibilities they promised over the years to their workers.
The bill also has attracted support from other senators from coal-producing states who have reputations as fiscal hawks, including Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio.
Portman and others cite a Congressional Budget Office analysis estimating it would increase federal revenues by an estimated $67 million over the next 10 years by imposing customs fees on trustees of the UMWA pension plan.
