Author: Mike Lillis

Speaking at the White House this morning, President Obama took Massey Energy to task over last week’s deadly mining explosion in southern West Virginia, saying that the tragedy was “a failure first and foremost of management.”

“Owners responsible for conditions in the Upper Big Branch mine should be held accountable for decisions they made and preventive measures they failed to take,” Obama said.

Seems that the folks at Massey didn’t appreciate the scrutiny much. A few hours later the company responded with a statement calling the president’s characterization “regrettable.”

“We fear that the President has been misinformed about our record and the mining industry in general,” the statement reads.

The company then pushes the blame for the enormous backlog of violation appeals — around 16,600 and growing — on the administration for failing to keep up with the increasing volume.

There has been criticism regarding the backlog of violations that have been appealed. There have been violations at Upper Big Branch that the Company does not agree with and a number of those violations have been appealed. The percentage of violations appealed at UBB and Massey is similar to that for the industry as a whole.

Unmentioned is how — since 2006, when Congress hiked the penalties for safety violations — the industry (Massey included) has responded by contesting more and more violations in order to delay the fines and prevent regulators from establishing the “pattern of violations” that might lead officials to shutter unsafe mines. Testifying before House lawmakers in February, Joe Main, head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, revealed the startling trend:

• In 2005, 7,200 citations were contested.
• In 2006, 10,036 citations were contested.
• In 2007, 19,546 citations were contested.
• In 2008, 46,792 citations were contested.
• And in 2009, 46,526 citations were contested.

Put another way, in 2005, mine operators appealed 6 percent of all safety citations. In 2009, the figure had jumped to 27 percent.

“We believe some operators contesting [significant and substantial] violations may be doing so because it delays the finding of a pattern, adding to the backlog and delaying MSHA from using this enhanced enforcement tool at their mines,” Main told the lawmakers. “As a result, there are operations that might be on a potential pattern of violations, but the backlog has prevented their cases from becoming final orders.”

Turns out, the Upper Big Branch was one of those operations he was referring to.

Judge for yourself, but in the following exchange with a reporter today, it sure seems that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is saying that the administration, through regulation and enforcement, has the power to ensure the safety of miners without Congress stepping in with new legislation.

From a press release sent along by Pelosi’s office:

Reporter: Given the enormity of the mine explosion in West Virginia and Massey Energy’s extensive record of delaying enforcement of the citations that it had received, do you think Congress needs to act to strengthen the ability to enforce mine safety standards?

Pelosi: Certainly, we have to subject the regulations and the enforcement to scrutiny to make sure that the miners are safe. That has not happened in the previous administration. The mine safety people were people out of the industry, and that has not done well.

Right now, under the Obama Administration, there has been a change, and it is much more worker and safety oriented, and we must again subject the regulations, the laws to scrutiny; but also the behavior of the mine owners and their regard or disregard of the laws and regulations to protect the miners.

It’s early in the investigative process. And so perhaps Pelosi is just being cautious here until the cause of last week’s deadly blast in West Virginia is learned. But there’s still good reason to be a bit surprised by the Speaker’s timid response: In 2006, when Congress enacted the MINER Act, Pelosi had voted against it, joining a small group of liberal Democrats who wanted much stronger reforms. They didn’t get them, and four years later 29 miners are being buried in Raleigh, County. If she was looking for a more dramatic backdrop for endorsing those stronger reforms, it’s tough to imagine what it would look like.

The vote was 59 to 38 on final passage. Three Republicans — Olympia Snowe (Maine), Susan Collins (Maine) and George Voinovich (Ohio) — joined every voting Democrat in favor of the proposal.

The bill, which now moves to the House, will provide a two-month cushion for unemployed workers to access federal unemployment benefits after their 26 weeks of state benefits have expired. It does not create an additional tier of federal benefits for those at the last level of federal help.

The deadline for filing for additional benefits was April 5. The legislation passed today, which is retroactive to that date, extends the filing deadline to June 2.

The bill also extends COBRA health subsidies and delays a pay cut for Medicare doctors. The $18 billion cost was not offset by spending cuts elsewhere in the budget.

Per their request, West Virginia’s lawmakers were briefed by the White House this afternoon on developments surrounding the investigation of last week’s explosion that killed 29 miners at the Upper Big Branch Mine south of Charleston. Here’s a hint: They aren’t exactly thrilled with what they’re hearing.

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) just issued a statement calling the tragedy “incomprehensible” considering the number of safety measures Congress has enacted over the years to protect miners. Massey Energy, the Virginia-based coal giant that owns the mine, bears the responsibility for the accident, Byrd added.

Disasters on this scale were supposed to be relegated to history following the passage of the 1969 Coal Act.  It’s incomprehensible that 29 miners should have perished in what appears to be a methane gas explosion, exacerbated by excessive coal dust.  It is a violation of the most basic health and safety laws.  We must determine why the enforcement process broke down, and hold accountable those responsible.

The ultimate responsibility for the health and safety of the miners falls to the mine operator.

No captain of industry, regardless of power or position, is beyond the reach the law. We mean to act swiftly, deliberately, and comprehensively to protect our miners, and to hold accountable any operator who puts profits above the health and safety of his own employees.

Federal safety officials closed parts of the Upper Big Branch 48 times in 2009 alone, Byrd said. The reason? “Repeated significant and substantial violations.” That’s nearly 19 times the national rate, Byrd says, “and the highest in the country.”

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) just released a statement of his own. Like President Obama earlier today, Rockefeller is spreading the blame around. ”This is a shared responsibility for the companies and the government alike to keep our mines safe,” he said.

They’ve been stalled on it for weeks, but tonight the Senate will vote on final passage of legislation providing a short-term extension of emergency unemployment benefits.

Republicans, behind Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.), have been fighting the $18 billion proposal because the Democrats didn’t offset the cost with spending cuts elsewhere. But the office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said this evening that Democrats have rallied a few Republicans behind the bill, leading Coburn to agree to tonight’s vote on final passage.

The bill extends the filing deadline for UI benefits through June 2 (retroactive to April 5), allowing those who have exhausted their 26 weeks of state benefits to access emergency federal help. It does not, however, create an additional tier of benefits for those who have exhausted everything they’re eligible for.

Aside from the UI provision, the bill also extends COBRA health benefits and delays a scheduled 21 percent pay cut for doctors treating Medicare patients.

After passage in the Senate, the bill will move to the House, where lawmakers are expected to pass it quickly. It then moves to Obama’s desk to become law.

This morning, it was President Obama blaming Massey Energy for not doing more to prevent last week’s deadly mining blast in West Virginia. This afternoon, it was Hilda Solis.

In an interview with MSNBC, the Labor secretary said that while all mining companies have experienced safety violations, Massey’s record indicates a particularly egregious offender.

“This particular mining group or operator has managed to kind of skirt the system and get away with making sure that they got off the bad list in time so that we would not have the ability to close them down,” Solis said. “This doesn’t typically happen in most of the other mines. There are other mines that operate with larger numbers of people and have a larger operation, but are not found in the same pattern of violation as this one mine — the Massey Upper Big Branch Mine.”

Several investigative teams this week have launched probes into the blast, which killed 29 coal miners working about 30 miles south of Charleston.

Congress is also poised to examine the nation’s mining safety laws, with lawmakers in both the House and Senate preparing hearings on the topic.

Of note, Solis — a Democrat who represented California in the House before becoming Labor secretary — voted against the 2006 MINER Act, which was the last major mining safety reform bill to become law. Those reforms, Solis thought, were too weak to prevent accidents and protect miners.

Roll Call breaks the story:

The House ethics committee has drafted rules that for the first time would define gay married couples as “spouses” for the purposes of filling out their annual Congressional financial disclosure forms.

The proposed change is found in new draft instructions for those financial disclosure forms, which lawmakers and senior staffers have to file annually, Roll Call discovered. The language says:

Same-Sex Marriages: In 2009, there were a total of four states which issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa and Vermont. (New Hampshire and the District of Columbia began issuing such licenses effective in 2010). If you and your spouse were issued a marriage license by any of these states and were subsequently legally married in that state, you must disclose all required spousal information on your Financial Disclosure Statement.

But don’t be surprised if the draft language doesn’t make it into the final version. The proposal is already taking heat from both gay rights groups and those opposed to gay marriage. Roll Call explains:

For gay rights activists, the disclosure requirement is an attempt to saddle gay couples with some of the obligations of marriage without providing the full benefits of marriage, such as the right to file joint federal tax returns.

Meanwhile, gay marriage opponents say this is a case of one committee trying to override all of Congress.

Tom McClusky, vice president of Family Research Council Action, the legislative arm of the FRC, said the Defense of Marriage Act is explicit in prohibiting federal entities from equating gay partners with opposite-sex married couples.

None of Congress’ openly gay lawmakers would be affected by the change, Roll Call notes, because none is legally married in his or her state.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) took to the Senate floor today to decry the crippling effect of federal income taxes on families and the economy.

“While we continue to spend and spend and spend here in Washington,” he said, “the tax burden carried by the average American gets heavier and heavier and heavier.”

He must not have seen the this new study from the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the nonpartisan Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. Crunching numbers from the Congressional Budget Office, another nonpartisan group, analysts there found that the median middle-class family of four will owe just 4.6 percent in federal income tax today — about half of what they owed in Ronald Reagan’s lowest tax year.

Much of the reason, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, is the generous tax break offered in the Democrats’ stimulus bill, passed a year ago.

Don’t try to convince McCain. Our tax-paying ritual, he said, “is a painful, complicated and uniquely American exercise.” As if the Belgians are taking home everything.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) made headlines a few weeks back when he killed the Democrats’ hopes of passing an unemployment benefits extension before the arrival of the deadline to file for new tiers, which came and went on April 5.

The Oklahoma Republican — known not endearingly as “Dr. No” — has insisted that the new costs be offset with spending cuts elsewhere in the budget. Democrats, on the other hand, want to tack the costs onto the deficit.

Today, Coburn has been at it again, offering two separate amendments that would have forced Democrats to offset the new spending. Both were shot down, but they did accomplish one thing: They’ve stalled the passage of a bill that could be helping hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers weather the jobs crisis, thereby keeping the Democrats from tackling other priorities.

Don’t say they aren’t consistent.

After more than a year idling in the House, a proposal to give the residents of the nation’s capital a voting representative in Congress finally seemed clear for passage this week when Democratic leaders announced they were ready to accept some version of the accompanying amendment that would scrap most of D.C.’s gun control laws.

That is, until Sen. Orrin Hatch stepped in.

The Utah Republican said Thursday that he’ll filibuster the bill the House expects to take up this month because, although it keeps the original provision granting Utah a new member of the House, it wouldn’t carve out a distinct new congressional district for that lawmaker to represent. Instead, every voter in Utah would choose the state’s fourth House member.

“Anyone who believes in what is left of federalism in America, regardless of their party or ideology, should oppose this legislation,” Hatch said in a statement. “Utah deserves an additional seat in the House, but like every other state it should have the freedom to elect its House members from regular districts. The federal government has no business dictating to any state which approach they must use. … Under the House bill, one House member from Utah would have three times as many constituents as the others.”

The Senate version of the bill — which passed early last year with Hatch’s support — would re-divide Utah to create a separate congressional district. The bill passed by a slim 61-37 margin, with most Republicans (including Utah’s Robert Bennett) opposing it. With Hatch aligned against the latest proposal, it would almost surely fail in the Senate.

H/t: The Hill.

“We owe them more than prayers. We owe them action.”

Those were the words of President Obama, who spoke from the White House Rose Garden this morning on steps he plans to take in the wake of last week’s explosion that took the lives of 29 West Virginia coal miners. And he didn’t mince words when it came to assigning fault for the calamity.

“There’s still a lot that we don’t know,” he said. “But we do know that this tragedy was triggered by a failure at the Upper Big Branch mine — a failure first and foremost of management, but also a failure of oversight and a failure of laws so riddled with loopholes that they allow unsafe conditions to continue.”

Although the Upper Big Branch was cited with more than 120 safety violations this year — and although parts of it were closed more than 60 times in the last 15 months over safety concerns — government regulators never took the step of shuttering the entire project. Dozens of other Massey mines, racking up thousands of similar safety citations this year, continue to operate in Appalachia.

Don Blankenship, Massey’s unapologetic CEO, said this week that the company’s long record of safety violations is irrelevant to last week’s blast.

“When somebody says, ‘Did the violations have anything to do with the accident?’ — they should not,” Blankenship told Charleston’s Daily Mail. “Because every violation is abated and agreed to by everyone before there is any further mining. So you would not think that any violation of the past had any relevance.”

Obama, though, isn’t buying it. And today, he outlined a new strategy forward — one that targets all mines, not just those run by Massey.

1) Immediate inspections of all mines. “Starting today, we’ll go back and take another look at mines across this country with troubling safety records, and get inspectors into those mines immediately to ensure they aren’t facing the same unsafe working conditions that led to this disaster.”

2) Closing the loopholes that keep unsafe mines open. “I’ve directed [Labor Department leaders] to work with Congress to strengthen enforcement of existing laws and close loopholes that permit companies to shirk their responsibilities.” That means tackling the backlog of violation appeals that companies have made to delay fines and avoid mine closures.

3) Overhauling the Mining Safety and Health Administration. “For a long time, the mine safety agency was stacked with former mine executives and industry players. … We need to take a hard look at our own practices and our own procedures to ensure that we’re pursuing mine safety as relentlessly as we responsibly can. In addition, we need to make sure that miners themselves, and not just the government or mine operators, are empowered to report any safety violations.”

The steps were immediately applauded by the United Mine Workers of America, which issued a statement saying that Obama “hit the nail on the head.”

“His commitment to miners’ health and safety is, in my experience, unmatched by any previous president,” said UMWA President Cecil Roberts. “The issues surrounding the explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine are very troubling, and we need to get to the bottom of what happened there. But we must go further and deal with the larger issue of serial safety violators like Massey that must be addressed.”

Some state officials have already taken it upon themselves to install similar precautions. West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin (D), for example, has shut down all underground mines in the state Friday, to allow the coal companies to inspect those projects for safety problems.

Congress is making plans to tackle these issues as well. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate labor panel, has scheduled a hearing on mining safety for April 27. And in the House, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who heads the Education and Labor panel, is planning to do the same, though the date hasn’t been set.

Such steps, Obama said Thursday, are the least the country can do for the miners who toil daily underground to keep energy costs cheap for everyone.

“We owe them an assurance that when they go to work every day, when they enter that dark mine, they are not alone,” Obama said. “They ought to know that behind them there is a company that’s doing what it takes to protect them, and a government that is looking out for their safety.”

The Charleston Daily Mail had a long sit-down interview with Don Blankenship, the head of Virginia-based Massey Energy, which owns the Upper Big Branch Mine where 29 miners were killed in an explosion last week. Massey has been the focus of much attention because of the long history of safety violations the company has racked up at its projects in recent months and years — including ventilation problems discovered at the Upper Big Branch just days before the blast.

Blankenship, though, basically dismissed that record, telling the Daily Mail that, “This particular mine I don’t think is very abnormal in terms of total violations.”

When somebody says, ‘Did the violations have anything to do with the accident?’ They should not, because every violation is abated and agreed to by everyone before there is any further mining. So you would not think that any violation of the past had any relevance.

Maybe not. But abatement is different than prevention. And a company with such a history of violations also has the obligation to explain why it’s not doing more to prevent those unsafe conditions from repeatedly surfacing to begin with. (It’s almost like they’re putting profits above safety.)

In the words of Celeste Monforton, a former mining safety official who’s now at George Washington University: “If they find these [violations] when they know the inspectors are coming, what happens the rest of the time?”

It’s a question that Mr. Blankenship will likely have to answer to lawmakers sometime soon.

By the slimmest of margins, the Senate last night approved a measure waiving the pay-go rules for legislation extending the filling deadline for unemployment benefits (not to be confused with the creation of Tier V) until June. Sen. George Voinovich (Ohio) was the only Republican to vote in favor of the motion, which passed 60 to 40.

The procedural move sets the stage for full passage of the bill, which also extends COBRA health subsidies for unemployed workers and delays a scheduled pay cut for doctors treating Medicare patients.

A $9.2 billion proposal passed by the House last month would have extended the programs through May 5 — a proposal that Senate Democrats had tried to pass several weeks back. But Republican opposition — combined with Congress’ two-week spring break — delayed the vote long enough that Democratic leaders tweaked the proposal so that (1) the benefits are retroactive to April 5, when the original benefits expired, and (2) the extensions run an additional month (at twice the cost). Party leaders are hoping the wider window will allow them the time to pass an even longer-term extension of all these programs — something that will see them through November’s midterm elections.

Democrats are trying now to get an agreement from Republican leaders to pass the $18 billion bill today. Otherwise, they’ll have to slog through a series of cloture votes that could push the process into next week.

After the Senate passes the bill (whenever that is), it will return to the House, where leaders are expected to approve it quickly before sending it on to the White House for President Obama’s signature.

It’s tax day, meaning there will be no end to the rhetorical grandstanding from conservative lawmakers about how the Democrats’ “tax-and-spend” policies are stifling the economy and preventing average folks from achieving the American Dream.

Conveniently, they will ignore these new numbers from the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the nonpartisan Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, which found that, however you slice them, federal taxes on the median middle-class family are just about at five-decade lows. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal policy group, explains:

This year, the Making Work Pay tax credit, which President Obama and Congress enacted as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is providing a credit of $800 to married joint filers ($400 to single filers). A median-income family with two children thus will receive an $800 tax cut in the return it files this year.

With the new tax cut, the median family’s federal income taxes will equal just 4.6 percent of its income in 2009. That is lower than in any year since 1955 (the first year for which these data are available) except for 2008, when another stimulus-related tax cut was in effect.

You think those numbers would be cheered by the Tea Party crowd. They haven’t been. Instead, you’ve got Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) taking to the chamber floor and condemning Democrats for “a budget with record taxes and spending that will add a trillion dollars to the national debt in the next ten years.”

They passed a national energy tax called cap and trade that will cause utility rates to go up on small businesses and family farms and businesses across this country by hundreds of billions of dollars.  And we just passed ObamaCare with $600 billion of tax increases.

And it isn’t even noon yet.

In February, White House mining safety officials told leaders on the House Education and Labor Committee some startling news: There were 48 mines across the nation, they said, that would likely be subject to the “pattern of violations” standard allowing the government to shutter the projects for the sake of miner safety. But they couldn’t do so, they added, because the backlog of appeals was preventing any such action.

“We believe some operators contesting [significant and substantial] violations may be doing so because it delays the finding of a pattern, adding to the backlog and delaying MSHA from using this enhanced enforcement tool at their mines,” Joe Main, head of the Mining Safety and Health Administration, told lawmakers. “As a result, there are operations that might be on a potential pattern of violations, but the backlog has prevented their cases from becoming final orders.”

At the time, however, MSHA officials declined to release the names of those mines, even to congressional leaders.

Today that changed.

MSHA on Wednesday released the names of those 48 projects to Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the panel, who, citing a “deep public interest,” promptly made them public. Of note, Massey’s Upper Big Branch Mine, which exploded last week, killing 29 miners, is on the list. The full list is here (PDF).

Miller’s office offers some useful background on how the mining companies have abused the appeals process to keep even unsafe mines open and operating.

Under current law, the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration issues a letter to frequent violators warning them that they may be sanctioned under a so-called ‘pattern of violation’. Once a mine is notified that they may be under a pattern of violation, the mine must take immediate actions to reduce future violations – approved by federal mine safety officials – or face drastic sanctions including mine closure for any future significant and substantial violation.

The list released by the committee today are those 48 mines that would have received this notice of a potential pattern of violation sanctions in October 2009 but for contested citations that had not been resolved due to delays caused by the backlog of more than 16,000 operator appeals.

This story is long from over.

Even as the White House is on the hot seat over claims that it’s been too lax on mining safety, one coal-country lawmaker has already shifted focus, ripping into federal regulators for being too strict on environmental protection.

Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, the lone Republican representing West Virginia on Capitol Hill, blasted the Obama administration Wednesday over recent actions by the Environmental Protection Agency to rein in mountaintop coal mining for the sake of protecting local streams. That move, Capito said, “only confirms their anti-coal agenda.”

“Decisions being made by federal environmental regulators are not focused enough on the importance of coal to the economy,” Capito said during a House hearing examining coal’s future in U.S. energy policy. “In my conversations with Lisa Jackson, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, she said that she explicitly omits economic considerations from her decision-making process.”

For the EPA to focus only on environmental protection, Capito says, is “particularly troubling.”

Earlier this month, the EPA announced that it would apply a new, stricter set of standards to proposed mining projects in Appalachia. Before EPA will approve new mining permits in that region, the agency announced, companies will have to show that they won’t raise the toxin levels in nearby streams above a certain level. The move largely targets the technique known as mountaintop removal, in which companies literally lop the peaks off of mountains to access the seams of coal inside. The process is popular with the industry because it’s cheap. But it also ravages neighboring communities, poisons headwater streams, causes flooding and contaminates the air.

The new standards will apply to all future Appalachian mine proposals, as well as the nearly 80 pending permits that the EPA announced last year it would scrutinize more closely.

The delays haven’t made Capito happy, who said Wednesday that they would “jeopardize jobs in Appalachia and weaken energy security for the nation.”

Mining safety officials only wish they were being criticized for being too strict.

The Charleston Gazette runs a story today providing further suggestion that a failed 2008 mining safety bill might have helped prevent last week’s deadly mining explosion in southern West Virginia. Here’s the thing: Despite the evolution of coal mining and the embrace of powerful modern machinery, the country’s rules for controlling combustible coal dust are still based on research conducted in the 1920s, the Gazette reports.

The 2008 proposal — which passed the House but was abandoned in the Senate — would have moved toward modernizing those standards by requiring federal officials to study the effectiveness of current methods used by mining companies to make coal dust incombustible.

Though the cause of last week’s blast has yet to be determined, experts suspect that it was related to methane buildup, ignited by an unknown spark. The presence of coal dust, in such cases, can exacerbate an explosion — an occurrence also suspected in the West Virginia episode. The site of the blast — the Upper Big Branch Mine — had been cited dozens of times this year for violations related to ventilation and the accumulation of coal dust.

It’s not like the issue hasn’t been on the radar, the Gazette writes:

Researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health published reports in 2006 and 2009 urging regulatory agencies to re-examine the standards, but no such action has been taken.

Look for this to be another in the long list of after-the-fact reforms considered by Congress and the White House in the wake of the West Virginia tragedy.

In 2006, after Congress passed the most significant mining reforms in three decades, a small group of Democrats offered a terse warning: The legislation, they said, didn’t go nearly far enough to prevent accidents and protect miners.

“Much more remains to be done to keep the nation’s miners safe,” Rep. George Miller said at the time. The California Democrat was urging additional measures designed to prevent explosions and make it easier for federal regulators to close mines when safety violations became persistent. His proposal eventually passed the House but was dropped in the Senate due, at least in part, to opposition from coal-country lawmakers, including Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.).

Four years later, as West Virginia is burying 29 of its coal miners following last week’s horrific Montcoal explosion, the calls for additional safety measures appear to be prophetic. Though the cause of that disaster might not be discovered for weeks, experts suspect that an accumulation of methane — combined with high levels of combustible coal dust — is the likely culprit. Massey Energy, the Virginia-based coal giant that owns the mine, had racked up 124 safety violations this year alone, including dozens of citations indicating problems with ventilation and the accumulation of combustibles.

Now, as investigators launch their probe into the cause of the blast — and congressional leaders are mulling their own legislative response — some lawmakers, worker advocates and mine-safety experts say they know a good place for Congress to start: Miller’s failed bill. Some even suggest that the proposal, dubbed the S-Miner Act, just might have prevented the West Virginia disaster altogether.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) — who, like Miller, opposed the 2006 reforms for being too weak — said through a spokeswoman Tuesday that Congress’ failure to pass the stronger safety measures represented “a tragic missed opportunity.”

Added Phil Smith, spokesman for the United Mine Workers of America: “If S-Miner had been passed, [federal officials] would have had the authority to close this mine down.”

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

After a string of deadly coal mining accidents ravaged Appalachia in 2006, Congress stepped in to install new safety measures that were sold as the most sweeping mining-industry reforms since 1977. The bill — the 2006 Miner Act — hiked the maximum penalty for safety violations; forced mine operators to build emergency underground shelters stocked with food, water and oxygen; required installation of updated communication devices; and created stricter flammability requirements for heavy equipment and lifelines.

Yet those provisions are aimed largely at making it easier for workers to survive accidents after they occur.

“There is next to nothing in that legislation that does anything to address keeping incidents from happening in the first place,” Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, said in a statement endorsing further reforms.

Enter Miller’s S-Miner Act. That proposal would have hiked the penalties for safety violations further; strengthened the requirements for sealing mined-out chambers to prevent methane from leaking into active sections; required that metal screening be installed on all mine roofs to prevent roof falls, which can spark explosions; required studies into the effectiveness of efforts to curb the combustibility of coal dust; and, perhaps most significantly, empowered the Mining Safety and Health Administration, a branch of the Labor Department, to close problem mines more easily when patterns of safety violations are found.

In short, supporters say, it was aimed at preventing mining accidents from happening at all. And after last week’s West Virginia tragedy, “almost everything in the S-Miner Act is still needed,” said Peter Galvin, a former Education and Labor staffer who helped write the legislation.

Galvin noted another weakness in the current law: It requires MSHA officials to consider the size of the mine operator when determining fines to ensure that the penalties won’t bankrupt smaller businesses — a consideration the S-Miner Act would eliminate. “If you can’t comply with the law, you shouldn’t be in this business,” said Galvin, who was an MSHA official before joining the Education and Labor panel.

Although House Democrats passed the S-Miner bill in January 2008, the legislation never got far in the Senate, where a series of factors conspired to kill it. President Bush, for example, was waving a veto threat over the proposal, arguing that it would undermine the reforms of two years earlier. The mining industry was lobbying furiously to kill the bill. And the Senate’s lead sponsor — Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) — had been newly diagnosed with the terminal brain cancer that would eventually kill him.

But there was another reason that bill didn’t move far in the Senate: The opposition of some powerful coal-country lawmakers. Indeed, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R), representing the coal-laden state of Kentucky, was opposed. And while Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) had officially endorsed the proposal, West Virginia’s other institutional Senate Democrat — Jay Rockefeller — rejected it.

“I’m not sure that what you do is try to pass another bill, add some more things on,” Rockefeller told the Beckley, W.Va., Register-Herald at the time, adding that the problem lies more with the failure of the MSHA to enforce the laws than with the laws themselves. “I don’t need a federal law to tell me to do my best every day,” he said.

Despite clear signs that MSHA could do more on the enforcement side of things, Rockefeller has also changed his tune in the wake of last week’s disaster. On Tuesday, he took to the Senate floor to say that enforcement alone might not be enough to prevent the next tragedy.

“Right now, what we do know is that we need to enforce aggressively the provisions of the Miner Act at all mines,” he said. “And where they are needed, we must put new laws in place.”

The saga is emblematic of the pattern that’s dictated the country’s mining policies for decades: New safety measures often follow in the wake of the biggest disasters, but rarely have lawmakers acted to anticipate those tragedies.

“It’s unfortunate, but every mine safety law we have on the books today was written in the blood of coal miners,” Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) said last week.

Not that even the most ardent supporters of the S-Miner Act see it as a cure-all to the nation’s mining-safety gaps. Indeed, the bill does nothing to address the tremendous backlog of violation appeals that mining operators have filed in recent years in order to delay fines and prevent MSHA from establishing the “pattern of violations” required to close entire projects.

Lawmakers will have plenty of opportunity to examine the nation’s mining safety laws. Both Miller, who chairs the House Education and Labor Committee, and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who heads the Senate labor panel, have vowed to hold hearings on mine safety shortly. Harkin’s office said Tuesday that the Senate gathering, scheduled for April 27, will “not attempt to explore the specific causes of the recent disaster” because the White House investigation will still be ongoing. Instead, the hearing “will examine the weaknesses in our laws that provide incentives for companies to ignore health and safety — such as inadequate penalties and the excessive delays that employers can create in challenging citations.”

No dates have been set for the House hearing, Miller’s office said Tuesday.

Meanwhile, a number of journalists and government watchdog groups are urging the Obama administration to open up the investigation to the public — a step the Bush administration was criticized for refusing to take.

It’s worth noting that the S-Miner bill would have required such a public investigation.

As the Senate moves this week to pass a very short-term extension of unemployment benefits, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert notes what few voices on Capitol Hill are willing to: That the string of temporary fixes to the nation’s safety net programs are doing nothing to address the highest long-term unemployment rate since the Second World War.

Blue-collar workers are suffering through a crisis characterized as a “depression” by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. Blue-collar job losses during the so-called Great Recession surpassed 5.5 million, and many of those jobs will never be seen again. This disastrous situation will not be corrected, as analysts at the center have noted, “by a modest recovery of the U.S. economy over the next few years.”

On top of that, the politics of an election year have prevented lawmakers from even proposing another stimulus plan large enough to tackle the problem.

More than eight million jobs vanished during the recession, a period during which three million new jobs would have been needed to keep up with the growth of the population. …

Right now there is no plan that can even remotely be expected to result in job creation strong enough to rescue the hard-core groups being left behind. These include: long-term unemployed workers who are older; blue-collar workers of all ages; and younger people in the big cities, in the rust belt and in rural areas who are jobless and not well educated.

The media’s infatuation with the trivial, Herbert adds, hasn’t helped.

We need to pay less attention to the Tea Party yahoos and more attention to the very real suffering of individuals and families trapped in an employment crisis that is unprecedented in the post-Depression era.

If only.

The Senate this evening took a step toward extending the filing deadline for unemployment benefits, hopping a procedural hurdle that sets the stage for final passage of the bill later this week.

The count was 60 to 34 to sidestep a filibuster by Republicans — notably Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.) — who were urging the Democrats to offset the $9.2 billion cost with unspent funds from last year’s economic stimulus bill.

The legislation — which the House had passed unanimously last month — extends COBRA benefits and the filing deadline for unemployment benefits through May 5. Those benefits had expired April 5, leaving hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers without an income.