Pensions: the Butch Lewis Act and the rescue plan
What they say
His campaign says that when Wall Street banks gambled away workers' pensions, he led the charge to make sure more than 100,000 Ohioans got the retirement they were owed.
“Sherrod led the charge to make sure over 100,000 Ohioans got the retirement they were owed.”
What the record shows ·
He introduced the Butch Lewis Act three times: S. 2147 in 2017, S. 2254 in 2019 and S. 547, the Butch Lewis Emergency Pension Plan Relief Act, on March 2, 2021. None passed under its own number. In 2018 he co-chaired, with Senator Orrin Hatch, Congress's joint select committee on the solvency of multiemployer pension plans. He voted Yea on Senate passage of H.R. 1319, the American Rescue Plan Act, in the sitting of March 5, 2021, which ran into March 6 (Roll Call 110, 50 to 49); it became Public Law 117-2 on March 11, 2021. Three sections of S. 547 are in that law's pension provisions almost word for word and under the same headings: a temporary delay of critical and declining status (section 9701), longer funding improvement and rehabilitation periods (section 9702) and adjusted funding standard account rules (section 9703). His bill's central relief paid for partitions of troubled plans from a new eighth fund under section 4005 of ERISA; section 9704 sets up that eighth fund in the same words but pays special financial assistance to plans directly, rather than through partitions. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation's list of approved plans, updated September 18, 2026, has 17 plans located in Ohio, with 26,348 participants between them.
Limit: Three Congresses of sponsorship, a vote for the law that funded troubled pension plans, and his own bill's text in that law go the way the claim does; the law passed 50 to 49. What holds the label to the claim's direction is the number, over 100,000 Ohioans. PBGC's list counts where plans are based, not where members live, so it leaves out Ohioans in plans based elsewhere, such as Central States in Chicago. It neither proves nor disproves the number.