You may have thought the Democratic convention was mercifully over on Thursday night when the oldest Democratic presidential candidate in history gave his acceptance speech. You’d be wrong, of course.
The convention was extended a couple of days when Democrats in the House took up the postal spending bill. Democrats want to give the failed U.S. Postal Service $25 billion more to waste, ostensibly because changes made by Louis DeJoy, the new postmaster general, threatened to slow down the mail, or something.
Democrat floor speeches weren’t much different than the virtual speeches made during the convention. Orange man bad, old geezer is good, GOP wants to kill you, and the Postal Service worked perfectly before DeJoy took over and began to “sabotage” mail delivery.
Will $25 billion speed up the mail? Probably not, but it sure looks good on a campaign commercial.
The bill passed largely along party lines, 257-150, with 26 Republicans bucking party leaders to support it.
The rare Saturday vote came after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced earlier this week that he would suspend cost-cutting measures until after the November elections.
DeJoy’s cost-cutting measures were put in place because the bloated, incompetent, Postal Service is bleeding red ink. The agency lost $9 billion last year and is expected to lose $13 billion in revenue this year. That’s a $13 billion difference between revenue taken in and expenses going out.
Any management team of a private company with that kind of record would be canned en masse. But the Postal Service is giving everybody raises.
As of 2020, the post office has lost $78 billion over the last 13 years. It should be obvious to anyone who is familiar with grade-school arithmetic that $25 billion is just more taxpayer money thrown into a black hole. It won’t solve anything.
But Democrats say that the funding as well as removing the cost-cutting measures will allow the post office to deliver those millions upon millions of mail-in ballots that are expected. It will enable the post office to return to those glory days when mail was never delayed, never lost, and everything was “practically perfect in every way.”
“The $25 billion largely messaging bill” proposed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) “has nothing to do with voting,” Meadows said on “Fox News Sunday,” and “has everything to do with a political statement.”
“I offered $10 billion plus reforms for the Postal Service that they’ve been asking for for a long time to Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi [D-Calif.] and [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer [D-N.Y.], and when we offered that there was another thing that came along with that, the postmaster general said he was willing to pay whatever overtime is needed to make sure we deliver the mail on time,” Meadows said.
Democrats decided long ago they didn’t want to pass any more pandemic relief bills. They put a lot of poison pills in their bill passed in April and they didn’t care that Republicans would balk at giving a spectacularly failed quasi-independent agency $25 billion to waste.
It’s not about getting old people their medication before they die — which was never, ever delayed before. It’s not about making people late to pay their bills, or ensuring that mailed-in ballots will be delivered on time — not when the postal unions say they don’t need the money and are not affected by the cost-cutting measures.
This is a transparently cynical political ploy designed to scare people. Unfortunately, it’s working like a charm.
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