Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, proposed to give $4 billion to the states to help them pay for voting by mail, with the provision that the states eliminate the requirement in many states that voters have an excuse, such as illness or plans to be out of state, to qualify for an absentee ballot. But in negotiations on the $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill in late March, Senate Republicans, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, only agreed to give the states $400 million for states to prepare for primaries and the general election and rejected the effort to expand voting by mail.
Trump on March 30, in an interview with Fox & Friends, said Democrats wanted to make it too easy to vote. “The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
That’s right, Trump said out loud what Republicans have been quietly expressing for years. Voter suppression is necessary for them to remain in power. From requiring state-issued photo IDs that exclude non-drivers, to reducing the number of polling places, to making it more difficult to vote by mail, and allowing Republican election officials to arbitrarily remove voters from the rolls, since the 1980s Republicans have been all about suppressing the vote of minorities, students and identifiable Democrats.
Trump on April 3 said he’s confident the general election won’t be delayed by the coronavirus, but he rejected the idea that every state should prepare to conduct mail-in voting. “No, because I think a lot of people cheat with mail-in voting,” said Trump, who has made baseless accusations about voter fraud since he won the presidency despite losing the popular vote in 2016.
Republicans also opposed a bailout for the financially-strapped Postal Service, which has been hit hard by the loss of first-class and commercial mail as a result of the pandemic recession.
House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Rep. Gerry Conolly, D-Va., who runs the subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, sounded the alarm that the agency could run out of funding altogether by June if Congress doesn’t act soon. First class mail has been dropping steadily since 2001. First class and commercial mail brought in $41 billion in fiscal year 2019, but revenue has dropped rapidly with the outbreak of COVID-19 and USPS expects a revenue loss of up to $17 billion between now and the end of the fiscal year as a result of the crisis. Maloney and Connolly sought $25 billion in emergency appropriations for the Postal Service to keep it from going broke by June.
The stimulus bill allows the Postal Service, which has 630,000 employees, to borrow $10 billion to keep operating, but Connolly called that “a slap in the face, and it’s not what they need,” in an interview with the Federal News Network. “They don’t need more debt capacity, they need debt forgiveness.”
Still, Connolly told WUSA-TV in Washington, D.C., “Trump personally objected to any assistance for the Postal Service.”
USPS on March 27 issued a statement saying it “remained concerned this measure will be insufficient to enable the Postal Service to withstand the significant downturn in our business that could directly result from the pandemic.”
Asked if he believed the Trump administration is deliberately allowing the Postal Service to fail, Connolly said, ”I don’t know that it’s a strategy, but I think they would not be bothered by the collapse of the Postal Service.”
Trump has, in the past, signaled his desire to privatize the service.
What does Trump have against the Postal Service?
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times wrote in a Jan. 9 column that the Postal Service is the most popular government agency, as the Pew Research Center found 90% of the public has a favorable view, outdistancing the National Park Service and NASA.
“Yet the conservative drumbeat for privatizing this crucial service never seems to slacken, even though privatization, which would inevitably mean crummy service and immense price increases, would be the surest route to turning public admiration for the USPS into public scorn,” Hiltzik wrote.
The Constitution provides, in Article 1, Section 8, that among Congress’ powers is to “establish Post Offices and post Roads,” along with the power to tax and borrow, declare war, coin money, establish federal courts and issue patents and copyrights.
But Congress has made it harder for the Postal Service to operate at a profit. In 2006, a Republican Congress under President George W. Bush mandated that USPS prepay $5.6 billion a year over 10 years its future expected retiree healthcare benefits. The Postal Service stopped paying in 2012 because it didn’t have the money, but it still has an accrued obligation of more than $47 billion.
Without the advance retiree health benefit obligation (which is imposed on no other federal agency), USPS would have a modest operating profit every year since 2013, according to a task force empaneled by Trump and led by the Treasury Department. But the Postal Service still faces a collapse in first-class mail. As Americans switched to automatic bill payment, email and evites, volume fell 47% from 2001 to 2019, to 54.9 billion pieces.
Parcel deliveries have taken up some slack, but that is what drew Trump’s ire, as he claimed in a 2017 tweet that the service was being made “dumber and poorer” by undercharging Amazon. Trump’s outburst was widely seen as an attack on Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post. Postmaster General Megan Brennan countered that the contract was fair and that, in any case, the rates were independently set by the Postal Regulatory Commission.
Critics of the USPS say UPS, FedEx and other delivery services could replace the Postal Service, but those commercial firms’ rely on the Postal Service to deliver packages the last mile in many remote, rural areas, since the Postal Service has an obligation to provide universal service that sends mail carriers past 150 million addresses six days a week. There’s no way a private service would undertake to deliver a first-class letter across the United States for less than a dollar. (It’s currently 55 cents, if you haven’t send a letter lately.) And we shudder to think what periodical delivery would cost.
Trump’s Office of Management and Budget in June 2018 proposed privatizing the Postal Service, which it said would “have a substantially lower cost structure, be able to adapt to changing customer needs and make business decisions free from political interference.”
In other words, Hiltzik noted, it would cut pay and staffing, while abandoning customers and communities far from the beaten path. “This is how free-market businesses such as cable operators work — they serve dense, high-population areas but keep remote places that are costly and difficult to serve out of their business plans.”
That’s nuts. The Founders recognized the importance of a public postal service when they included it in the Constitution, and universal postal service remains vital to protecting democracy. And this year, the Postal Service could be a vital cog in protecting election access. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2020
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