Republicans Fail to Protect the U.S. Postal Service Against Illegal Interference with the Mail

INTRODUCTION

The vast majority of Department of Veterans Affairs prescriptions are fulfilled by mail. But as U.S. Postal Service delays mount, more and more veterans are reporting long wait times to receive critical medication and VA staff says the problem is only growing. As veterans and VA staff report USPS prescription delays, officials say order early:

More than two dozen veterans and more than half a dozen VA employees who work in department pharmacies nationwide reported delays for mail-order prescriptions to Connecting Vets.

Rural America, which is heavily dependent on the U.S. Postal Service, has been hit hard. The Chick’s in the Mail? America Faces New Worries With Postal Crisis:

[T]the cardboard boxes addressed to her poultry farm were silent.

“We could hear a few, very faint peeps,” Ms. Hampson said. “Out of 500, there were maybe 25 alive. They were staggering. It was terrible.”

This is what happens when the mail suddenly becomes unreliable in rural towns and stretches of countryside where there are scant FedEx or UPS deliveries, and where people rely on the post office as an irreplaceable hub of commerce and connection.

Now, with delays raising fears that the United States Postal Service is being hobbled by a combination of financial problems, politicization and pandemic, farmers and other rural residents say they are particularly vulnerable to the crisis roiling the postal system. And while President Trump’s own words have raised alarms that the problems are part of an effort to keep Democrats from voting by mail, many of those being hurt the most live in rural areas that overwhelmingly support the president.

Across the country, rural residents already have been affected in several ways.

Checks and plant shipments are delayed, and tracking them down can take hours in rural towns without quick, reliable internet. Replacement parts for farm machines are late in coming. Prescription refills are taking a week or more to reach mailboxes, a particular threat because rural communities are older than most of America.

On Native American reservations, among the country’s most remote places, families are driving five hours to get medicine and worry about being disenfranchised in November.

Postal workers deliver where Amazon and FedEx won’t: USPS worker covers ‘the last mile’ to rural America:

Mail carriers in many ways are a lifeline for rural residents. Elderly customers are still dependent on the Postal Service. More than 1 in 5 older Americans live in rural areas, according to the Census Bureau.

Restructuring and other possible changes at the Postal Service, however, could severely affect rural carriers such as Miller and the millions of rural residents they serve.

American service men and women have been voting by mail since the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops usually cast ballots by mail. This year could be more complicated, Pentagon office says.

The average transit time to voting centers in the United States — whether ballots are sent from giant citylike bases in Germany or tiny outposts in the Syrian desert — should be six days, Graeve said.

But a Pentagon office dedicated to facilitating voting for troops and other Americans overseas has cautioned that remote voting could be more complicated this year.

“Communication with the voter is more important now than ever,” the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) said in a recent covid-19 update on its website, urging election officials to communicate potential options to voters to ensure that ballots arrive in time. “Due to international airport interruptions, many military and overseas voters will face greater-than-normal challenges with returning mail back to the United States in a timely fashion,” it said.

Lisa Lawrence, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said “slight delays have occurred and the Military Postal Service Agency continues to monitor conditions globally with specific attention given to balloting materials.”

NPR reports More Than 550,000 Primary Absentee Ballots Rejected In 2020, Far Outpacing 2016:

An extraordinarily high number of ballots — more than 550,000 — have been rejected in this year’s presidential primaries, according to a new analysis by NPR.

That’s far more than the 318,728 ballots rejected in the 2016 general election and has raised alarms about what might happen in November when tens of millions of more voters are expected to cast their ballots by mail, many for the first time.

“Most absentee or mail-in ballots are rejected because required signatures are missing or don’t match the one on record, or because the ballot arrives too late.”

Billionaire Charles Koch’s 50-year war on the U.S. Postal Service is being waged by Treasury Secretary and Bond villain Steve Mnuchin, and GOP campaign donor and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. One Billionaire vs. the Mail. Their Republican allies in the Congress have been trying to turn this public service provided for in the U.S. Constitution into a for-profit privatized business for 50 years.

The Pew Research Center survey released April 9, 2020 shows an overwhelming 91 percent of respondents have a favorable view of USPS, higher than any other federal agency — or any politician in America.

REPUBLICANS OPPOSE THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called members of Congress back from August recess to the Capitol to vote on a stand-alone bill to fund the U.S. Postal Service, which has suffered a financial hit from the coronavirus pandemic, and a systematic effort to undermine the Postal Service from President Donald Trump and his toady Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, in an illegal effort to interfere with vote-by-mail in November’s election.

In a rare Saturday session, the House passed a $25B bill to boost Postal Service:

The House on Saturday passed legislation that would prevent the U.S. Postal Service from making any changes to its operations that could slow delivery of mailed-in ballots for this fall’s elections.

The bill passed largely along party lines, 257-150, with only 26 Republicans bucking party leaders to support it.

Arizona Delegation: Yeah: Gallego, Grijalva, Kirkpatrick, O’Halleran, Stanton; Nay: Biggs, Gosar, Lesko, Schweikert

The rare Saturday vote came after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced earlier this week that he would suspend cost-cutting measures until after the November elections.

On Friday before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, USPS chief Louis Dejoy said there’s ‘no intention to’ bring back removed mail-sorting machines.

Democrats argued DeJoy’s announcement fell short and didn’t reverse the measures already enacted that have caused mail delivery delays. Additionally, there’s a clear lack of trust between the Democrats and the postmaster general.

“His comments are one thing; his actions will be another,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “And that’s why we have this legislation.”

The proposal would prevent the Postal Service from making any operational changes that would result in reduced service – such as removing mail-sorting machines, restricting overtime pay or handling election mail as anything other than first-class for prioritized delivery – until the COVID-19 pandemic is over.

It would also provide $25 billion for Postal Service operations, which is an amount originally recommended by the agency’s board of governors. House Democrats also included the funding in the $3.4 trillion HEROES Act coronavirus relief package that they passed in mid-May.

“It makes absolutely no sense to implement these dramatic changes in the middle of a pandemic, less than three months before the November elections,” House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), the author of the bill, said during floor debate.

While some GOP lawmakers crossed party lines to vote for the bill, House GOP leaders urged their members to vote against it. And the bill is poised to hit a brick wall in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has signaled his intention to ignore it.

The White House has also issued a veto threat.

* * *

DeJoy testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Friday that the Postal Service is “fully capable and committed to delivering the nation’s election mail securely and on time.”

DeJoy further acknowledged the recent delivery delays, including the effect on some veterans’ mail-order prescription medications processed through the Veterans Affairs health system.

“We all feel bad about what the dip in our service, the level, has been,” DeJoy said in response to questioning from Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio).

DeJoy is also set to be grilled by members of the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Monday morning.

Funding for the Postal Service has been part of ongoing negotiations over the coronavirus relief package. But the talks have been stalled for weeks, primarily over funding for state and local governments, $25 billion for the U.S. Postal Service, and extending the $600-per-week federal unemployment insurance supplement that expired at the end of July.

The House passed the Heroes Act relief package back in mid-May which addressed all of this through January 2021. The House has done its job. The Senate, however, is a failed institution under Mitch McConnell.

THE GRIM REAPER OF THE SENATE LEGISLATIVE GRAVEYARD

“The Enemy of The People,” the “Grim Reaper” of the Senate legislative graveyard, Mitch McConnell, actually had the audacity to “accuse House Democrats of ‘ignoring urgent needs’ of Americans in passing legislation that includes $25 billion to boost the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), calling it a ‘piecemeal Postal Bill.’” McConnell rips Democrats for passing ‘piecemeal Postal Bill’, ‘ignoring urgent needs’ of Americans:

House Democrats have spent weeks ignoring the urgent needs of American workers and families, but they rushed back to Washington the instant that overblown conspiracy theories about the U.S. Postal Service convinced them their own jobs might be in jeopardy. My full statement: pic.twitter.com/41VdckTLw0

— Leader McConnell (@LeaderMcConnell) August 22, 2020

This evil GOP bastard had months from the time that the initial CARES Act was passed to prepare for what came next after it expired at the end of June, and he literally did nothing for months. At the eleventh hour before the CARES Act expired, McConnell proposed something that even he knew that he did not have the votes for among Republican senators to even bring to the floor for a vote. The Senate has yet to vote on anything, while they all went home for August recess. They won’t be back until after Labor Day.

I’m sure I will get in trouble for saying this, but the pure abject evil of Mitch McConnell makes me wish for the days of yore when someone like him could be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail by angry villagers.

His willful inaction and his indifference to the suffering of Americans is quite literally costing Americans their lives and livelihoods. It gives macabre meaning to his hand-picked monicker of “Grim Reaper.” He quite literally represents the angel of death for many Americans.

It is not enough to humiliate Mitch McConnell by defeating him for reelection this November, a rare occurrence for a Senate Majority Leader.

Everything that he represents and the brand of partisan politics he has built over the years must be destroyed and repudiated and thrown on the ash heap of history.

I have often said that Mitch McConnell belongs in the pantheon of the worst senators in U.S. history. He is demonstrably a villain who believes in authoritarianism, as long as his party and he remains in control. No one has abused the rules of the Senate and American democracy more than has Mitch McConnell. History will not remember him kindly, nor should it. His name should be spoken with disdain as we do for those most despised villains in American history.

As Dana Milbank wrote, Mitch McConnell, the man who broke America:

By rights, McConnell’s tombstone should say that he presided over the end of the Senate. And I’d add a second line: “He broke America.” No man has done more in recent years to undermine the functioning of U.S. government. His has been the epitome of unprincipled leadership, the triumph of tactics in service of short-term power.

As Charles Pierce said, There Is No More Loathsome Creature Walking Our Political Landscape Than Mitch McConnell:

He doesn’t have the essential patriotism god gave a snail. He pledges allegiance to his donors, and they get what they want. He’s selling out his country, and he’s doing it in real-time and out in the open. This is worse than McCarthy or McCarran ever were. Mitch McConnell is the the thief of the nation’s soul.

And as historian Christopher Browning has written, “If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell.” The Suffocation of Democracy.

Mitch McConnell and his evil minions must go.