Congress, States, Cities Must Rise Up, Fight for the USPS

Congress, States, Cities Must Rise Up, Fight for the USPS

It’s our hope that in the coming days there is a national uprising against the President’s purposeful sabotaging of one of America’s most important institutions, one created by the Constitution itself, the United States Postal Service. 

NDN is encouraging every government jurisdiction in the nation to begin a formal process to challenge what the President is doing – hold hearings, demand/subpoena Postmaster General DeJoy to testify, investigate and sue/prosecute if necessary.  This has to be an all-out, universal push back from every corner of the country. 

Why? Because by holding back monies and taking other steps to undermine the USPS, the President is harming people in every town, city, and state in the country.  He’s making it harder for businesses of every size to operate, thus slowing the economic recovery; he’s making it harder for people to receive their life saving medicines, and people will surely die in every state from unnecessary delays; every election in the country for every single office, not just the Presidency, will be degraded, and potentially millions of Americans could see their votes invalidated.  

In a time of social distancing and a raging pandemic, we are all relying more on the mail and package delivery to keep us safe.  Frankly, there is something depraved and even sadistic about the furious disabling of the postal service we are seeing right now.  

There is time for the President and Congress to come together behind a deal to give the postal service the resources it needs to help the American people successfully navigate the pandemic.  In these challenging times, the postal service should be getting all the resources it needs; the longer term questions about its role can wait until a time when Americans can leave their homes safely again.  States and localities should be putting as much pressure on Washington as possible to force a deal in the next few weeks.  

Those working to ensure the integrity of the postal service will be able to use the President’s statements from the last few days against him. This came this morning -  “Now, they need that money in order to make the Post Office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview on Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo. He added: “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped.” 

And the Washington Post reported on his remarks yesterday in the White House this way:

….President Trump says the U.S. Postal Service is incapable of facilitating mail-in voting because it cannot access the emergency funding he is blocking, and made clear that requests for additional aid were nonstarters in coronavirus relief negotiations.

Trump, who has been railing against mail-in balloting for months, said the cash-strapped agency’s enlarged role in the November election would perpetuate “one of the greatest frauds in history.” Speaking Wednesday at his daily pandemic news briefing, Trump said he would not approve $25 billion in emergency funding for the Postal Service, or $3.5 billion in supplemental funding for election resources, citing prohibitively high costs.

“They don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in voting. So therefore, they can’t do it, I guess,” Trump said. “Are they going to do it even if they don’t have the money?”

……The final reason we must rise up in the days ahead is that we also must begin a formal process of pushing back on the rampant and unprecedented election cheating and dirty tricks we are seeing from the President and his allies now.  If we don’t push back, forcefully, the President will keep escalating, and the possibility of the US having a free and fair election this fall will be ever more in doubt.  We can’t let that happen.  

Let’s get to work people.