But Congress is in a tight spot. If it bails out the miners, why stop there? Why not bail out all of the other pension funds, private and public, that are on the brink of insolvency? Miners are not the only group that is in danger of losing health care and pensions as their employers go bankrupt. One of the biggest private pension funds in the country, the Central States Pension Fund, which provides benefits for truck drivers, is also almost out of money and is proposing cutting benefits for current and future retirees. The miners and truckers funds are examples of defined-benefit multi-employer pension plans, meaning they provide a certain amount of money every month to covered workers from a number of companies. According to the Congressional Budget Office, such plans have $850 billion worth of benefit obligations, but have assets of only $400 billion. According to the Pension Research Council at the University of Pennsylvania, there are 1,300 such multi-employer pension plans, covering millions of workers.

“If you open the door here to the United Mine Workers, then you have 1,300 other plans waiting there to say, ‘Where's my bailout? Why is it fair that you preserved 100 percent of coal miners’ benefits?’” argues Rachel Greszler, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

There is, however, a federal backstop for failing private pension plans (though not for failing health-care plans). When the automaker Studebaker went out of business in 1963, it terminated its pension plan and more than 4,000 workers lost most or all of their promised pension benefits. That eventually motivated Congress to pass the Employment Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, which set up the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, which pays out reduced pensions in the event that a private pension fund becomes insolvent. (The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation itself is running out of money, which is another problem.)

The miners are no different than other employees who have had to turn to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation when their pension funds failed, argues Greszler. “This would be entirely unprecedented to say that the government is going to step in and bail out a pension fund and not even allow it to go to PBGC,” she told me.

Congress has, however, stepped in to bail out the miners’ health fund before. In 1992, Congress passed the Coal Act, which provided funding for health-care benefits of so-called “orphaned” retirees whose employers had gone bankrupt. It is the only time that Congress had intervened to provide retiree health benefits that had been promised by a private party. Congress intervened again in 2006 after a series of bankruptcies in the coal industry.

That Congress has taken such actions raises another question: Why do miners get special treatment from Congress? The miners emphasize “The Promise” and say that because the federal government promised them health and welfare benefits in 1946, it still owes them such benefits now. They say that the government essentially prevented the miners from striking for better benefits and conditions at the mines, because coal was necessary for the nation to keep functioning. As a result, they argue that the government’s promise to ensure decent working conditions for miners and retirees needs to be upheld. “The fact of the matter is that there’s a moral responsibility here, and the government has always lived up to it,” Phil Smith, the spokesman for the United Mine Workers, told me. This was also the position of then-Secretary Elizabeth Dole in 1989, when she convened a commission to look into coal miners’ benefits. “Retired miners have legitimate expectations of health care benefits for life; that was the promise they received during their working lives, and that is how they planned their retirement years. That commitment should be honored,” the Coal Commission concluded.