8/13/20
The post office has been, since before the founding of the United States, an essential service. So essential that when it came time to write a Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 gave Congress the power and the responsibility to “establish Post Offices and post Roads.” Yet, at precisely the moment when the country has begun to recognize the vital role of essential workers, postal workers have been under attack and the United States Postal Service has been undermined at every turn. The coronavirus pandemic should have been the moment when the Postal Service was finally accorded the respect and support it deserves. Instead, it is threatened by a White House wrecking crew that has coalesced, for reasons of short-term political strategy and long-term financial interest, to exploit a crisis. Desperate to secure a second term, the president now openly admits that he is messing with the Postal Service because mail handlers and letter carriers make it possible to hold elections that rely on absentee ballots and universal mail-in voting. Voting by mail produces high-turnout elections in normal circumstances, and it provides a vital assurance for democracy in extraordinary circumstances—such as a pandemic moment when voters are encouraged to shelter in place rather than stand in long lines to cast ballots in crowded polling places.
Trump, an unpopular president even before he mangled the response to Covid-19, recognizes the threat high turnout poses to his reelection bid. On Thursday, he removed all doubt about his determination to undermine voting rights when he blurted out in an interview that one of the reasons he is stalling coronavirus relief negotiations is because Democrats are trying to save the Postal Service. “Now they need that money in order to have the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.” Trump is blocking even a down payment on USPS funding because, as he says, without those funds “that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting.” Even by Trump standards, that’s an astounding admission of why he’s so determined to deny the Postal Service a lifeline. Congress had better act fast. The system is crumbling, not only because of pandemic pressures but mainly because the man Trump just put in charge of the largest postal system in the world is an extremely motivated dismantler. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump appointee who took charge in June, has imposed service cuts, personnel changes, an overtime ban, a hiring freeze, schedule shifts, and routing changes that American Postal Workers Union President Mark Dimondstein says have already slowed down and “degraded” mail delivery.
