The Progressive Populist Today Blog: Editorial: Who's Rigging the Vote?

Friday, August 28, 2020

Editorial: Who's Rigging the Vote?

Democrats had a successful virtual convention, which showcased the fights for racial justice, health care and restoring human decency on the way to nominating Joe Biden for the presidency. The selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate eased anxieties of Democrats, who were encouraged by solid speeches by Harris, and Michelle and Barack Obama. Biden’s acceptance speech refuted ludicrous claims by Trump and his minions that the former vice president was losing his mental faculties (yet another case of Trump projecting his own flaws onto others).

The following week, Republicans confirmed that their party has become Donald Trump’s personality cult. The Republican National Convention showed no concern about police abuse of Black people, or the working poor losing their access to health care, or uniting the nation for the common good, as Trump seeks four more years to end American carnage. The GOP didn’t even bother to adopt a platform outlining the party’s policy agenda. Instead, it resolved, “That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda,” followed by a rehash of the 2016 platform, which mainly criticized the Obama-Biden administration.

The RNC speaker list was marbled with members of the Trump family and featured warnings of apocalypse if Dems take over. The opening night’s slate featured speaking roles for Don Jr., his girlfriend, shouty Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who face felony charges of unlawful use of a weapon for waving their guns at peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters who were passing by their mansion in a gated community.

The Trump campaign was rattled after a week that saw Steve Bannon, the mastermind of the 2016 election, charged with mail fraud alleging he fleeced donors to a private border wall; the Senate released a bipartisan report on Russia’s efforts to help Trump win in 2016; a government agency concluded the top two members of the Department of Homeland Security were serving in violation of the law; a federal court rejected Trump’s effort to keep his tax returns secret; and unemployment claims were ticking back up.

In remarks on the first afternoon of the convention, after a roll call delivered his nomination for a second term, Trump warned Biden would pursue a radical leftist agenda — which is hilarious to actual leftists, particularly after former Ohio Gov. John Kasich and other disgruntled Republicans endorsed Biden the week before. The Great Misleader claimed the only way Democrats can win the election is if it is rigged. Of course, Trump is projecting his own predicament. Nearly all polls show Biden leads Trump nationally and in key battleground states. Trump is stalled at approval rates in the low 40s, while disapproval rates have been above 50% for the past 3-1/2 years — even before he botched the pandemic response.

With the current unemployment rate above 10%, and businesses around the country going belly-up because the Trump administration has failed to control the coronavirus pandemic, it will be hard to overcome that public disapproval in the remaining 2-1/2 months until the election. That apparently is one of the reasons Louis DeJoy was brought in to sabotage the Postal Service and cause delays in deliveries that reduce the public confidence in voting by mail. Even after the public backlash forced DeJoy to stop pulling out the automated mail sorting machines from post offices (which would also send business to the private mail processing business DeJoy has a financial interest in), DeJoy has refused to reinstall the mail sorting machines.

The Postal Service is supposed to be independent of political influence. The postmaster general is appointed by a Board of Governors, with seats reserved for members of both parties, who are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate for seven-year terms. But after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked the confirmation of five postal governors nominated by President Obama in 2015, Trump ended up with six appointments when he took over. The New York Times reported Aug. 22 that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was a key player in selecting the board members who hired the Trump megadonor now leading the Postal Service. Mnuchin made clear to the Board of Governors of the USPS that “he wanted the governors to find someone who would push through the kind of cost-cutting and price increases that President Trump had publicly called for and that Treasury had recommended in a December 2018 report as a way to stem years of multibillion-dollar losses.”

DeJoy testified at a hearing of the House Oversight Committee Aug. 24 that he did not order the major overhauls that included taking mail processing machines out of post offices or removing postal collection boxes. He added that he did not know who ordered the removal of the processing machines, but he would not commit to reversing their removal.

House Democrats produced internal US Postal Service documents showing widespread drops in the agency’s performance started in July, about a month after DeJoy took over as postmaster general.

According to the documents released by lawmakers, first-class mail service dipped 8.1% below its baseline, marketing mail saw an 8.42% decline from baseline service, the delivery of periodicals saw a 9.57% decline, while priority mail service saw a 7.97% decline compared to its baseline number, Business Insider reported.

While graphs indicate service fluctuations due to hardships imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, USPS performance sharply declined in July, a month after DeJoy, a former Republican megadonor who made contributions to President Trump, assumed his role as postmaster general on June 15.

One of DeJoy’s recent policy changes at the USPS requires trucks to leave on time, preventing them from waiting even five minutes for other mail shipments to arrive before they depart. In some cases, Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) said, mail trucks were forced to leave, even when they were empty.

Despite the economic collapse nearing Depression-era levels, Republicans are resisting further COVID-19 stimulus measures because they think the economy is recovering. They point to 9.3 million workers who were called back to their jobs from May through July. But as long as the coronavirus remains unchecked, it will remain hard for businesses to get customers out like they were in February, before the lockdowns.

Republicans celebrated when the claims for unemployment compensation for the week ending Aug. 8 fell below one million, but that still left 971,000 people newly out of a job and seeking assistance. The following week, 1.4 million applied for unemployment benefits, which made the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate 10.2% with 29.1 million workers either getting unemployment benefits or waiting to see if they will get benefits. And many businesses, particularly in retail, personal care services and recreation and entertainment, won’t be hiring until an effective vaccine and/or cures are widely available so that people are comfortable going out in public again.

That won’t win Trump re-election, unless he can keep Democrats from voting. Make sure you’re registered (see Vote.org for information) and your registration matches your photo ID. Vote early if you can; if you need to vote by mail, request your ballot as soon as you can, fill it in and send it back at least two weeks before the election, so even Louis DeJoy can’t mess it up. — JMC