Earlier this year, President Donald Trump appointed a new postmaster general who has been working to effect a turnaround of the troubled United States Postal Service (USPS), which has bled billions of dollars over the last decade.
The aggressive cost-cutting measures taken by Trump’s pick to head the USPS have, however, threaten to hamper House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) plans to implement widespread mail-in voting in advance of the November election, and she has called the lower chamber back into session to take action to stop them, as the Washington Examiner reports.
“Alarmingly, across the nation, we see the devastating effects of the President’s campaign to sabotage the election by manipulating the Postal Service to disenfranchise voters,” the Examiner quoted Pelosi as saying in a statement on Sunday.
Pelosi hits the panic button
Blasting the new head of the USPS, Pelosi stated, “Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, one of the top Trump mega-donors, has proven a complicit crony as he continues to push forward sweeping new operational changes that degrade postal service, delay the mail,” adding, “And — according to the Postal Service itself — threaten to deny the ability of eligible Americans to cast their votes through the mail in the upcoming elections in a timely fashion.”
Pelosi and many of her Democratic colleagues contend that the Trump administration is attempting to starve the USPS of funds and eliminate large numbers of mail collection boxes and sorting machines ahead of Election Day.
Based on those claims, they are pushing a new piece of legislation called the “Delivering for America Act,” which would prohibit “any changes to operations or level of service it had in place on January 1, 2020.”
However, the Trump administration has responded by asserting that it is standard practice to dispose of outdated equipment and that the demand for mailboxes has been declining for years. Fox News reported on Monday that thousands of mailboxes were removed during the administration of former President Barack Obama in 2016 alone.
Pelsoi wasn’t along in sounding the alarm, as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) got in the act as well, calling on his Republican counterpart Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)to reconvene the Senate and take up Pelosi’s bill, as Newsweek reported.
Exaggerated concerns
Though Democrats have not let up on their claim that the GOP is attempting to cripple the USPS, but even anti-Trump attorney and lobbyist Nick Harper recently acknowledged that there is no danger that the agency will become insolvent this year.
“While their income is still not what it needs to be, the increase in online shopping during COVID-19 has helped it stay above water,” Harper explained on Saturday in a Medium post. “And the Treasury made a $10 billion loan available.”
“In its fiscal quarter report filed June 30, 2020, USPS indicated that it has ‘sufficient liquidity to continue operating through at least August 2021,’” he went on to note, adding, “USPS is in a critical condition, but it does not appear that it will shut down before the November election.”
It appears that the Democrats’ newfound urgency about returning to D.C. and actually doing the work of legislating is less about duty and more about preserving the possibility of imposing mail-in ballots — and the risk of fraud that entails — on the American electorate this fall.
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