Political Quotes

“once again I am here to announce a looming deadline hanging over the heads of our hard-working and patriotic coal miners. It is a shame that we have to do this again, and the reason is that we didn't fix it the first time. If we don't pass the American Miners Act, there will be 1,200 retired coal miners who will lose their healthcare by the end of this year. Those 1,200 coal miners spent a lifetime underground, in part, digging the coal that we needed to become the strongest and greatest Nation the world has ever seen. They have always done the heavy lifting. They gave up raises and bonuses year after year in exchange for the promise of economic security when they retired. So they paid for this. They held up their end of the bargain, and it is time that we held up ours. Why is the healthcare of retired coal miners once again on the chopping block? We have gone through this before. It is because of the courts. Our court system has again allowed coal companies to break their promises to their workers. Through bankruptcy, they were able to shed their obligations to pay for these hard-earned healthcare and pension benefits, and then they were able to reemerge from bankruptcy as a profitable company once all the money was basically taken from them. This time around, it was Westmoreland Coal Company and Mission Coal Company that both declared bankruptcy approximately at the same time in 2018.…”