What Trump and his buddies are doing to the Post Office is a disgrace that must be stopped. Glad to see the House stepping up:
The House Oversight Committee will hold an emergency hearing on mail delays and concerns about potential White House interference in the U.S. Postal Service, inviting Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and Postal Service board of governors Chairman Robert M. Duncan to testify Aug. 24, top Democrats announced on Sunday.
To me, this is all hands on deck. I’ll be calling my House rep (kind of a wanker but he does what Nancy says) and Chuck and Gillibrand tomorrow.
The post office is a big issue in rural areas. So this is a great issue for the Montana and Maine (which is extremely rural off the coast) Senate races:
Sara Gideon (Maine)
Steve Bullock (Montana)
The Democratic Convention
cmorenc
Can they subpoena PM DeJoy and force him to testify and ask him awkward questions? Or can Trump successfully stonewall the committee on this?
Just Chuck
@cmorenc: DeJoy could just not show up. A subpoena only matters if they enforce it, and they haven’t yet.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Just Chuck:
I’m told if you look up Blue Dog in certain political dictionaries, you see a picture of Jim Cooper. I saw a story yesterday that an “anonymous friend” told a reporter that DeJoy is very uncomfortable with the attention he’s getting. I suspect since he’d never known the name of a Postmaster General, no one would learn his. And I’m guessing he’s the kind of guy who’s built a massive fortune without much scrutiny and might get very uncomfortable if reporters start going through public records….
Mike in NC
As many have pointed out, Fat Bastard and Jared merged their collective brain cells and decided to pull this dumb stunt in the middle of August, when lots of people could get suitably pissed off, instead of doing it in the middle of October when the resulting chaos just might have worked in their favor. Please proceed, Republicans.
Geo Wilcox
It’s also a great thing for Biden to run on, saving the Post Office from Trump. Talk about stepping on your dick with metal cleats…. Trump really did not think this through did he, letting Kushner start this crap up.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Drain. The. Swamp. Drain. The. Swamp.
apparently, she’s still the nominee, not yet Senate-confirmed.
CaseyL
If they gave it any thought, they probably thought August was a good time because “you don’t roll out new products in August,” since people are busy with their summer plans.
Naturally, they didn’t take the Covid-19 issue into account: people have no summer plans other than staying healthy and sane. Also, people are dependent on the USPS as they haven’t been for years, because of Covid-19.
Glad to see the House is stepping up. I hope like hell they enforce the subpoenas this time. Maybe they will, since hamstringing the USPS affects people very individually and directly.
scav
Mr McFeely will haunt their nightmares.
debbie
I just emailed Rob Portman: Silence is complicity. Mealy-mouthed non- and half-responses are collusion. How will you face even your most ardent supporters who won’t get their prescriptions before they run out or be able to pay their bills on time? You need to stand up and fiercely represent your constituents or you risk being tarred with Trump’s criminality for the rest of your life. You have a choice.
debbie
NPR just reported Trump’s CoS (I think; they’re so interchangeable) say no sorting machines will be removed between now and November. Asshole: When will the ones already removed be returned?
debbie
@Mike in NC:
CEOs and CEO-types always act immediately. That is the mark of a dynamic leader. //
Jim, Foolish Literalist
stipulating that I am the worst at the “Who is DougJ quoting?” game…
The Marvelettes? Seems appropriate
trnc
@Mike in NC: Of course, when they scream it’s all political, Dems need to point out he’s a major repub donor installed for obviously partisan purposes.
Also, I wonder how many departed DT lackeys have NOT been able to profit like they thought. If most, I would highlight that to DeJoy, et Al every chance I got.
Another Scott
Donated earlier. :-)
Relatedly, it’s not often one sees a “thorn” these days. Two is almost unheard of!!
DeLong – What Does Hanging wiþ þhe New York Times Staff Do to People, Anyway?—Highlighted:
Hear, hear!!
(Emphasis added.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Just Chuck
@Another Scott:
Title extraction code written by someone of the Norse persuasion, apparently ;)
The Moar You Know
@debbie: no need when you can just turn them off and get the same effect, minus the publicity. I plan on voting in person, no matter what.
Arm The Homeless
It’s so very tiring having to hope on stars that a Romney, McCain or Justice Roberts steps in to pitch a hail-mary lest we slide further into an overt Banana Republic.
We shouldn’t have, “dopey fascist can’t shut his mouth and nominate a less crass bunch of goons”–as the lynchpin for saving democracy.
Start hauling these douchebags before relevant House committees and jail the ones who won’t comply. Make SCOTUS affirm that they believe the Executive is a king so there is no doubt when we pack the court with a gaggle of 30-something Liberal jurists.
Catherine D.
I bet DeJoy never expected protesters outside his homes, either. It makes me so very happy!
Another Scott
@Just Chuck: DeLong is extremely well read, and loves history. The thorns were intentional.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) – I had no idea that it’s related to Thursday (Thor’s day I knew) as well.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
The oversight committee is important substantively but they’re slow. This is a great political issue for Democrats- the mail is delayed all over the country. Donald Trump did that. They don’t even have to get to WHY he did it. Just make sure people who already know the mail is delayed know why it’s delayed.
People know that mail is delayed. They’re complaining all over the country. Trump delayed their mail.
Villago Delenda Est
DeJoy is on the indelible tumbrel manifest now. Hope he’s happy.
Fleeting Expletive
Looks like hotel guys just suck at governance. This sap, the ambassador to Ukraine Sond… whatever, and the Big Burrito himself.
What became of that person who tried to scale the WH fence carrying a gun, where the SS removed him from a press conference? That story sort of evaporated, as far as I can tell.
Yesterday was my birthday and I know for a fact I have presents and cards that didn’t come because of Dejoy’s dicking around, but I got all the calls I needed and I’m glad to still be around. I intend to survive this shit so I can see how things turn out.
Kay
I don’t even think they need to oversight committee. The public noticed the mail was delayed LONG before any of these people did. The public did the oversight.
Joe Manchin “barnstormed” postal facilities in West Virginia to tell people Trump is screwing up their mail. They should all be doing that. They don’t even have to “go back into session”. Just go do your jobs in your district or state.
scav
@Another Scott: Must have been extra intentional the þh then.
Ksmiami
I’m writing a letter to Dejoy’s home in Greensboro. Here’s his address: 806 Country Club Drive. Greensboro, NC 27408
Villago Delenda Est
@debbie: It’s too late. He committed to treason when he voted to acquit Donald.
debbie
@Kay:
It should surprise no one that someone who can bankrupt a ca$ino in less than two years (in Jersey, for fuck’s sake) can come up with hare-brained schemes like this.
JoyceH
@Fleeting Expletive: He didn’t have a gun and didn’t try to scale the fence. It was out in the park and the fellow apparently confronted an agent saying that he had a gun and would shoot the agent and then made a run at him. Sounds like suicide by cop if the events were as described.
Arm The Homeless
@Ksmiami: might be worth the Ameros to make it a piece of registered mail just to see how long it takes compared to normal people’s mail. Plus, it’s never a bad time to toss a few more bucks at the Post Office.
Buy stamps, folks!
Another Scott
@Just Chuck: @scav: Super duper intentional. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yes, but I figured if I started off with that, no one would read through to the end.
JoyceH
@The Moar You Know: I too plan on voting in person. I want my vote counted on Election Day, because you can tell by the things he’s saying that if Trump is ahead that night, he’s going to try to shut down the vote count.
Nora
@Arm The Homeless: Yesterday I went to our local post office and bought $107 worth of stamps, most of which I’ll be using to send out Vote Forward letters (they advise you to use fancy/different stamps to get attention). Win-win.
Frankensteinbeck
@Mike in NC:
They did not pull it in August. This started months ago, before the push for more mail-in voting. Trump put an MBA type who has business reasons to ruin the Post Office in charge of it, Trump already hates the Post Office because of his asinine petty grudge against Bezos, and the MBA type has been running it into the ground with standard ‘cut costs and treat employees like a problem to be minimized’ rules. Those rules do not specifically target ballots and hurt rural Trumpy areas worse than urban liberal areas.
All this anti-voting stuff was tacked on after the fact, presumably because when someone complained it might interfere with the vote, Trump thought that was great.
Sab
@debbie: Has Rob Portman’s office ever responded to you?
Ksmiami
@Arm The Homeless: I’ll do that tomorrow- these ppl are just a toxic combo of malevolence and incompetence aren’t they?
Kay
There are times to rely on lawyers and there are times one doesn’t have to, because it’s such a politically perfect set up for the party out of power :)
The lawyers are nice and hearings in 2 weeks are super, but just demonize the hell out of Trump delaying everyone’s mail. Each of them could do that now, without permission, and they can do it in every state and district and under the category of “constituent service”.
Fleeting Expletive
@JoyceH: Thank you. Fifty other things have happened since that incident, and I missed it. My curiosity was merely idle, but I’m glad you told me.
Frankensteinbeck
@Catherine D.:
I have noticed that public pushback like this scares the shit out of conservatives. In 2018, Republican reps and senators canceled town halls en masse when they started getting angry constituents yelling at them. DeVos freaked when just a small public crowd protested her. It would not surprise me if DeJoy can be intimidated into backing down.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay:
Great way to get free and favorable local media, too. Catapult the filter, if you will.
natem
Can’t wait for the Times pieces on all these ghouls who’ve enabled Trump’s ratf*cking bemoaning how all the other parents at their children’s boarding schools shun them, and how they’re never invited to the DC cocktail parties anymore. I.E., the P.R. work the NYT dutifully does on behalf of people who end up being hired as pundits on cable news.
Kay
It’s hard to explain how important mail is to lower income older people, especially rural low income older people. You would think I was exaggerating if I told you what I saw working for the USPS. I don’t 100% understand it because 8 days out of 10 were delivering advertising to them, but it is something they COUNT ON and there isn’t a whole hell of a lot else they can count on. We’re all rattled anyway because of the covid and this probably upsets them more because of that.
Amir Khalid
Can Please Mr Postman be considered a pop standard?
Sab
@Kay: My sister in California has been writing letters to my dad in his nursing home. None of the letters and postcards have arrived. We had been blaming the nursing home. Now we blame the USPS.
PPCLI
@Kay: Yes, a thousand times yes.
The Democrats have a winning issue here, if they remember to press on both points:
a) Trump has had a plan for some time, accelerated by DeJoy, to wreck the post office. All these slowdowns are intentional. This has been going on for awhile, and as people can see it’s getting worse.
b) Trump is striving to weaponize this already existing intentional destruction of the post office to wreak havoc on the coming election.
b) is absolutely crucial and has to be broadcast far and wide, but a) is crucial too, and politically I think there are tens of thousands of voters who will be much more moved by a) than b). Every rural Trump voter whose medication hasn’t shown up is a potential loss to the Trump campaign. Even if the voter is skeptical about b). They know a) is happening, and it is potentially catastrophic for them
EDIT: I see your subsequent comments are making just this point. I agree!
Patricia Kayden
Villago Delenda Est
@Frankensteinbeck: They’re all cowards.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I’m proud to say my rep is first-termer Mary Gay Scanlon, who has been very visibly fighting all the good fights since Day 1. She’s not on the Oversight Committee but joined the letter they sent to DeJoy on August 7.
Listening now to the opening interfaith service from the DNC convention. Live on Facebook and Youtube.
Ken
I’ve known a few people who relied on those Coupon Clipper packets and Penny Saver fliers to make ends meet, so it’s not that surprising.
MagdaInBlack
Yesterday Hal Sparks ( i was in the car, he was on the radio) noted that Dejoy holds at least $30 mil in stock in XPO Logistics, and since screwing up the mail also includes the christmas rush…..subcontractors like XPO will benefit. Thoughts?
debbie
@Sab:
I don’t expect a response. I used to get one of those generic here’s-what-I’ve-done emails about five or six weeks later, but no more.
Elizabelle
Andy Borowitz from The New Yorker (satire):
debbie
@Sab:
This is the graphic I woke up to and is why I emailed him.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@MagdaInBlack: I’ve heard that he owns stocks in two companies that are competitors to the USPS, a total of something like $75 mil. Ludicrously corrupt conflict of interest, like everyone else this administration hires.
Maybe we found that out from his required financial disclosure forms, which would be a tiny point in his favor if true. Unlike Jared who had to redo his disclosure forms 1000 times because he kept “forgetting” required disclosures.
Luciamia
@Mike in NC: and of course, after all the hue and cry Trump is now trying to blame it all on Democrats.
Arm The Homeless
@Ksmiami: I would be interested in how regular mail is moving compared to the more expensive products. Might help to have facts of everything is being slowed, or just the less “profitable” mail to gage whether Dejoy is running a normal scam, or a treasonous scam
@Nora: That’s the spirit. My mantra this year has been “Don’t Panic, Organize!” and finding small, banal ways to make it known I oppose the wishes of Fascists is kinda my kink now
J R in WV
@Luciamia:
Haven’t you heard?
Trump isn’t taking responsibility for anything~!!~
Kent
Honestly, all of these top administration people are outright crooks. That’s how you rise to the top of Trump world. Even if there aren’t actual crimes committed in office by people like DeJoy and Devos and the rest of them. they surely have crimes in their past that need to be investigated. The rule should be, if you are a criminal, and you choose to hold public office, that isn’t a get out of jail free card for your past crimes. It means you had better not have any. That’s why we do vetting, or used to do vetting before Trump
I’m fine with locking up DeJoy for past crimes if everything he is doing to the USPS is technically legal
Kent
@PPCLI: Dems (or Dem-friendly groups) should be rolling out a whole batch of really slick TV ads about the USPS and what Trump is doing. And push them out into all the rural media markets in swing states and red states. All kinds of slick high-production value ads showing rural postal trucks delivering the mail to rural seniors in snowstorms, in scenic rural areas, in picturesque all-American main street towns. And do voice overs of seniors who can’t get their medication, who’s checks are lost in the mail. Interviews with postal employees (faces disguised like they are mob informants) talking about how Trump is trying to dismantle the post office and hurt rural Americans.
Run them everywhere, especially Fox News so Trump will see them. It will make his head explode. And if Fox refuses to run them, make it the story on CNN that Fox is refusing to run ads about saving the Post Office.
House Hearings aren’t going to accomplish much. They will just run out the clock with delays. Take the fight to them on the public airwaves. Dems used to be good at that kind of shit. I can’t think of a better issue to use on older rural voters to either (1) sway them to Biden, or if not (2) discourage them from voting at all for Trump. Either way is a win.
Mike in NC
Just read at the WaPo website where Trump wants another one-on-one meeting with Putin before November. Because the last advice he got — to bust heads of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square — worked out so well for him.
Sab
@debbie: Thanks. I hadn’t seen that. It explains why my dad in the nursing home in Akron isn’t getting mail from his kids in LA and SF.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kent: I’m all for locking people up who are convicted of crimes, but I really think the internet left– including, as that term not always does, this blog– needs to take a deep breath when it comes to the notion that criminal convictions and jail sentences are going to fall like a righteous rain from heaven come January. People like DeJoy spend a lot of money to lawyers and accountants so stay within the lines, and if charged, pay a lot more to lawyers who need to convince one juror, or one appellate judge (I think, IANAL) that what they did may have been awful but was not, in fact, illegal.
Arm The Homeless
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I am all about a sprawling, multi-year RICO case in DC that if nothing else keeps these assholes under a watchful federal eye. If you can’t convict the money men, you can sure start rolling up the underlings who can’t afford the White Shoe representation and let the chips fall where they may when there isn’t a Presidential pardon in the offering
Sure Lurkalot
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: In truth, neither his companies, nor FedEx or UPS, are competitors to the USPS. If those companies had to gear up and deliver to every rural zip code, millions of PO boxes, etc., how profitable would they be? If such were a profitable venture, UPS and FedEx would have expanded their capabilities decades ago.
Oh, let’s not forget the funding of pension liabilities 75 years into the future. US companies bitch about fully funding current liabilities such as health insurance for their employees.
Geminid
A week ago a Montana District Court judge threw 5 Green Party candidates, including one for U.S. Senate, off the state ballot. It turned out that the state republican party had financed the Green Party petition campaign but had had hidden its action by not forming the required commitee. Several hundred petition signers formally requested to withdraw their signatures, but the republican Secretatary of State ruled that their withdrawals had occurred after a deadline he pretty much pulled out of thin air. He is appealing the judge’s ruling.
Kent
Oh, I agree with you. I expect there will be very few convictions. But that doesn’t mean we don’t put the Trump administration under the microscope and chase every thread to see where it leads. Otherwise they will do it all over again next time (and there will be a next time). There has to be a price and this is the only way to impose one.
Even if you are a billionaire, being subject to criminal investigation is no fun at all. Nor is having your private affairs gone through with a microscope.
JoyceH
@Kent: We also need to examine the agencies that were put under the direction of entirely unqualified people. We have to re-educate the public to realize that government does important things for the public good and when they’re run by incompetent partisan hacks, the public welfare suffers. Let’s make sure that the public is never again tempted to cast a vote for a game show host.
Ken
The pessimist in me says that if the last eight months haven’t done that, nothing would. The optimist says that most people have realized that, but we’ll never get below the crazification factor.
schrodingers_cat
Does anyone have the names of the 5 candidates that BS placed a hold on. Because BS sympathizers are claiming that they were all Republican men that the NAACP and the Postal Union did not want.