Water Resources Development Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. PORTMAN. Well, first, I want to thank my colleague from West Virginia for holding this colloquy today. I enjoyed listening to Senator Capito, his colleague from West Virginia, talk about it, and I know Senator Brown was here. Senator Warner, from Virginia, was out there at the rally just before me. I get to follow him again.

What I said the other day when we were at the rally was that this is not a partisan issue. This is one where you have Republicans and Democrats coming together to identify a real problem: 100,000 miners having their pensions endangered and 20,000 miners potentially losing their health care at the end of this year.

That is a really urgent problem for them. He did a good job today of talking about some of these issues. I loved when Senator Manchin talked about the fact that this country was built on an energy economy that included coal. I will tell you, we have mined 4 billion tons of coal in Ohio. We are still a State and a country that depends on coal for our electricity. In Ohio, it is about 58 percent of us who turn on a light when we go home and get our electricity from coal.

So it is incredibly important for our economy and has built this country, in effect. It has given us in Ohio the ability, frankly, to attract a lot of industry because we have had relatively low energy prices, stable energy prices.

This is about telling these miners who for years and years have been doing the hard work, playing by the rules, doing exactly what they are supposed to do that we are not going to let them down. That is all this is about. It is just not fair to pull the plug after all of those years.

As was noted earlier, having talked to a lot of these miners, some of them are in poor health. Part of the reason they are in poor health is that they were in the coal mines for many years. There are higher rates of cancer, for instance, among some of these miners. There are a lot of widows because some of the spouses have moved on.

This is about keeping true to our commitment and our promise. I do think that we are going to have this committee vote a week from today. I am told it was pushed back from today to a week from today because the Congressional Budget Office had not done the score yet of what this costs.

OK. That is fine. But let's be darn sure that we do not leave town to go back in October without addressing this issue. That is something I am going to insist on, as will my other colleagues that I have heard from today. I got a commitment on this. I got a commitment from the leadership, from the chairman, who I know is good to his commitments. We ought to be darn sure that we do the right thing for these miners. We had a hearing on it. We had people come forward and talk about the specifics of it.

I will tell you, I know some people have differences of opinion on the fiscal impact of this. As a person who is a fiscal conservative and proud of that, I will tell you the alternative to this is that these plans could potentially go insolvent and the PBGC, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which is the government program that backs all these up, would then be in deep trouble because this is the second biggest multiemployer plan that could be in trouble. That could result in taxpayers having to pick up the tab in a much more significant way.

The actuaries have looked at our plan. They believe this will enable us to get through this period of time where we have a tough issue with so many companies going bankrupt. The Senator from West Virginia, Mr. Manchin, and I have talked about the underlying problem here, which is that there are a lot of people who are trying to do away with coal.

The so-called war on coal is leading to some of these bankruptcies of these companies and some of these pension problems. That is part of the issue, too. So the Federal Government also has played a role here. We need to recognize that as well.

I am going to thank my colleagues for coming to the floor today. I want to say that we look forward to the opportunity to debate and discuss this issue in committee a week from today to get a strong vote. Let's make it a strong bipartisan vote. Let's be sure that it comes to this floor with that kind of support and goes over to the House, and we can get something done to help those people who worked hard and played by the rules and deserve now for us in the Congress to look after them.

I thank my colleague.

I yield back.

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