A key Republican is calling on President-elect Trump to wade into a Senate dispute over coal miner healthcare that is threatening to shut down the government tonight.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said Friday the issue is highly personal for coal miners and their widows in West Virginia, and that they would benefit from Trump making a public statement to help spur congressional Republicans to provide a better deal for them.
“We’ve been blasted with job loss, bankruptcies … our more senior miners having their healthcare, you know, so tenuous for them,” she told reporters. “So it’s not just this particular issue that is driving frustration in West Virginia, it’s all of it together.”
Although she doesn’t support the Democrats’ threat to shut down the government over the issue, she believes her GOP leadership should commit to moving a long-term extension of healthcare for coal miners to the Senate floor early next year.
She added that it would be “helpful” if Trump would step in to provide more political pressure on the issue and possibly prevent a government shutdown, and said she and other colleagues have already reached out to the Trump transition team about it.
Democrats from coal-mining states, including Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, are holding up a final spending bill from coming to a full vote on the Senate floor unless Senate Republicans agree to a one-year extension of the miners’ healthcare, instead of a four-month extension included in the funding bill.
Because of coal-industry bankruptcies, more than 22,000 coal miner retirees are scheduled to lose their union’s healthcare benefits by the end of this year if Congress does nothing.
The Democrats, including Brown and Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., have called on Trump to weigh in on the side of coal miners after pledging to save their jobs during the campaign and winning West Virginia, the heart of coal country, by a 41-point margin over Hillary Clinton.
McCaskill, earlier this week, said Congress “should not go home until we fix this for coal miners.”
“The president-elect needs to step in and say, ‘I meant what I said about coal miners, I’m going to take care of them,'” she said.
