It's Thursday, May 26 and Day 103 since Justice Antonin Scalia died and Mitch McConnell laid down his Supreme Court blockade: No meetings, no hearings, no votes on his replacement. It's also Day 71 since President Obama named Merrick Garland to be Scalia's replacement. What's the Senate doing today instead of considering the Supreme Court nominee?
Well, here’s something the Senate could be doing, if Democrats were in charge. (If Democrats were in charge, Garland would probably already have been confirmed.) On Wednesday, Sherrod Brown and other Democrats sent a letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell asking him to take action to protect the pensions of thousands of coal miners and hundreds of thousands of other workers:
As you know, there is an urgent need for the Senate to address the impending loss of health and pension benefits for thousands of our nation’s coal miners, as well as the looming multiemployer pension crisis facing hundreds of thousands of other hardworking Americans. Just last month, almost 300,000 Central States retirees, participants and beneficiaries narrowly avoided pension cuts—some up to seventy percent—when the Treasury rejected the plan’s application under the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act (MPRA). Central States, however, is still expected to become insolvent within a decade and it is emblematic of our pressing multiemployer pension problem. A significant number of multiemployer pension plans are also experiencing funding shortfalls and may run out of the resources to deliver earned benefits. In addition, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the federal agency tasked with protecting these defined benefit retirement plans, and the hard-earned pension payments that they support, is itself troubled, and may not be able to adequately address this crisis.
Therefore, before we break for the long summer recess, we must move the bipartisan Miners Protection Act (S. 1714), which will protect both the health care and pension benefits for retired coal miners and their dependents with funding through the Abandoned Mine Land (AML) program. At the same time, we also ask that you work with us to address troubled multiemployer plans like Central States, because time is working against those retirees as well.
But that’s not happening in this Republican-controlled Senate, just like confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland aren’t happening.
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