The Patriot Post® · Democrats Go Postal
“Colluding” with Russia to win the 2016 election is bad enough, but Donald Trump is now literally removing mailboxes all over the country just to “deny the ability of eligible Americans to cast their votes through the mail in the upcoming elections in a timely fashion.” Or so House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat propagandists in the Leftmedia want you to believe.
“The removal of po, uh, mailboxes, uh … is to undermine the Postal Service at a time when the Postal Service is needed now more than ever,” fretted Pelosi. President Trump, she claims without evidence, is waging a “campaign to sabotage the election by manipulating the Postal Service to disenfranchise voters.”
“They’re going around literally with tractor trailers picking up mailboxes,” Joe Biden decried from his bunker. “I mean, it’s bizarre!”
Noted political theorist Taylor Swift worries that Trump has “chosen to blatantly cheat and put millions of Americans’ lives at risk in an effort to hold on to power.”
Al Gore was even more crass: “By tampering with the Postal Service, [President Trump] is in effect putting his knee on the neck of American democracy.”
Pelosi insists that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is a “complicit crony” with Trump in a scheme to disenfranchise American voters. She called the House back into session this week to “save the Postal Service” with a bill that “prohibits the Postal Service from implementing any changes to operations or level of service it had in place on January 1.” DeJoy has been summoned to Capitol Hill for a hearing next week, and some Democrats have even called for him to be subject to an FBI criminal investigation. What could go wrong?
The real debate is still over Trump’s opposition to $25 billion more in bailout cash for the Postal Service. That bailout has nothing to do with mail-in voting, though Democrats (and, to be fair, President Trump) want you to think it does. It has little to do with the pandemic for that matter, but that’s another story.
This is the USPS we’re talking about, not some model of business efficiency. Since 2007 — long before COVID or Donald Trump — the USPS is $80 billion in the red. Besides general mismanagement, especially regarding pensions, that’s largely due to a 33% decline in mail volume since 2006 and ridiculous federal regulations that hamper efficiency.
The truth is that DeJoy, who only took the job in June as the unanimous choice of the USPS’s independent board of governors, is making normal decisions to turn around a failing business. Overtime has been cut, mail-sorting machines are being deactivated, and underutilized collection boxes are being removed or moved to better locations. Some 12,000 collection boxes were also removed over five years during the Obama-Biden administration. Were they suppressing votes?
This is absolutely not a nefarious plot to cheat in the election, and for all the times Democrats caterwaul over Trump’s foolish dabbling in conspiracy theories, they ought to be ashamed of their leaders for doing the same thing now. If they weren’t shameless, that is.
“By the way,” The Wall Street Journal editorial board wryly notes, “the letter-carriers union endorsed Joe Biden on the weekend.”
Update: The postmaster general announced he will suspend all reforms or changes until after the election.