[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 9]
[Senate]
[Pages 12862-12863]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       PENSIONS FOR MINE WORKERS

  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I wish to speak about an issue that is--to 
say it is unfinished business is an understatement. The fact that we 
are standing here in the fall of 2016 and the Congress of the United 
States hasn't fulfilled its promise to coal miners is really an insult 
not only to coal miners who spent a lot of years in the mines in a lot 
of States, mine and other States, but it is also an insult to the 
country because their government--our government--made a promise to 
them more than a generation ago.
  Some people may remember the book ``The Red Badge of Courage.'' That 
was written by Stephen Crane, a great novelist who didn't even make it 
to the age of 30. He died in his late twenties.
  Stephen Crane is known for being a great novelist and known for 
writing ``The Red Badge of Courage,'' but one of the most compelling 
accounts he ever wrote or anyone has ever written about the dangers and 
horrors of a particular line of work was Stephen Crane's essay, just 
before the turn of the last century, about a coal mine in my hometown 
of Scranton. The name of the article published in Collier's magazine 
was ``In the Depths of the Coal Mine.'' I will not of course read all 
of it and recite major portions of it, but suffice it to say that 
Stephen Crane, a great novelist, went into a coal mine and reported 
what he saw there, not as a work of fiction but as a work of the harsh 
realities in nonfiction of what the miners were facing.
  In one part of the essay, he described the mine he was in when he 
descended all the way down. Of course, you only have to go down a very 
short distance before it is pitch black. You can't even see your hand 
in front of your face. He described the mine as a place of ``an 
inscrutable darkness, a soundless place of tangible loneliness. . . .''
  Then he went on from there describing what he saw, describing young 
children working in the mines, children the ages of 10, 11, 12, and 
into their teens, working in the mines; describing the process of how 
the coal got out of the mines, mules pulling these carts full of coal. 
He described what my fraternal grandfather saw when he was there as a 
young boy at the age of 11, who entered a mine not too far away from 
this particular mine, just as Stephen Crane was writing.
  Stephen Crane concluded the essay by talking not only about all of 
the horrors of the mine but how miners could die in that mine. He 
described it at one point in summation as the 100 perils or the 100 
dangers that those coal miners faced.
  Why do I raise that today? I realize coal mining in the present day 
or even 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, maybe even 30 years ago, was not 
nearly as dangerous as it was in the 1890s or the early part of the 
1900s, but it is still very dangerous work today and has been for all 
these years. We have seen too many places where miners have been 
trapped and rescued or trapped and never rescued, killed, in places 
like Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, and other places over more 
than a generation--in fact, many generations. Those miners worked there 
for, in many cases, more than 10 years or 20 years. Some of them also 
served our country in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, or beyond.
  They were promised by their government that they would have a 
pension. A number of us, in a bipartisan fashion, came together to 
support the Miners Protection Act, which would make sure that at a 
minimum the now 12,951 miners in Pennsylvania would get that pension 
they were promised and a smaller number--but a big number, in the 
thousands, in Pennsylvania--would also get the health care they have a 
right to expect. This was a promise by the Federal Government. It 
wasn't a ``we will try to'' or ``we hope to do it'' or ``we will make 
every effort to do it,'' it was a hard-and-fast, irrefutable promise, 
and it is time the Federal Government has delivered on that promise to 
those miners and their families.
  They went into the darkness and the danger of a coal mine in the 
1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. Some of them were younger than that. 
Some of them still do it and still engage in that work. They should 
have a right to expect that just as they kept their promise to their 
families that they would go to work every day and work hard and bring 
home a paycheck, just as they made a promise to their employer that 
they would go into that mine every day and do impossibly difficult work 
year after year and sometimes decade after decade--and they fulfilled 
that promise to their employer and to their families. Some of them made 
a promise to their country that not only would they work hard, but they 
would serve their country in war and combat.
  The question is, Will we keep our promise to them?
  Their promise was much tougher than our promise. All we have to do 
here to keep the promise is vote the right way, vote in the U.S. Senate 
to make sure miners get their pensions and health care and vote in the 
House in the same way. That is not hard to do--to walk into the well of 
the U.S. Senate or somewhere in this Chamber and put your hand up. That 
is pretty easy to fulfill the promise we made to them. This isn't a lot 
of money for these miners. In addition to Social Security, sometimes it 
is about 530 bucks a month for all of that work they did. So it is not 
hard to fulfill this promise that our country and our government made 
to them.
  These are people who are not in the newspaper every day, they are not 
on television. They may not have a lot of power. They may not be 
connected to people who are powerful or people who are wealthy. They 
are just hard-working people who did their job and deserve to have that 
promise fulfilled.
  I believe this is a matter of basic justice. It is basic justice 
whether we are going to fulfill that promise. Saint Augustine said a 
long time ago, hundreds of years ago: ``Without justice, what are 
kingdoms but great bands of robbers.''
  If you apply that to today's terminology, a kingdom in some sense is 
like our government--a governing body for a nation. Without justice, 
what is a government but a great band of robbers. We owe people that 
basic justice, that promise.
  So let's fulfill our promise as Democrats, Republicans, and 
Independents in the U.S. Senate. Let's not allow inaction or other 
circumstances, political or otherwise, to prevent us from doing the 
right thing. Let's not rob these miners and their families of what they 
deserve, what they earned. We are not giving them anything. We are just 
voting the right way so they have a promise fulfilled.
  I would hope that before everyone goes home to do whatever folks will 
do--travel to their States or campaign or whatever they are going to 
do--I would hope, at a minimum, we would take action on a number of 
things we talked about today but in particular that we make sure 
families don't have to worry about the horror and threat of Zika, 
something we can prevent the spread of if we take action; that families 
will not be threatened by it in Florida or Puerto Rico or anywhere 
because beyond that, we don't get to the solution, the action. Of 
course, we hope we can go home and say we at least said to miners and 
their families: We have fulfilled the promise the government made to 
you generations ago. That is the least this body and the

[[Page 12863]]

other body should do before we leave Washington.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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