The United States Postal Service Board of Governors is all white men, and Republicans. It was a clean slate for Trump and company because Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders blocked appointments by President Barack Obama for reasons that remain uncertain.
Well, at least that’s what this article in The Hill claimed.
I tweeted out exasperation that we find ourselves in this situation, in part, because of past liberal purity. Well, that elicited a strong reaction from a Sanders staffer:
Other luminaries in Bernieworld piled on, like his former national spokeswoman:
Oh shit, I thought. Did I get this wrong? I depended on that article which stated [emphasis mine]:
President Obama has nominated five people to serve on the board – three Democrats and two Republicans. The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Postal Service, has approved all five. But the full Senate has not taken up the matter because a senator – believed to be Bernie Sanders – has placed a hold on their nominations.
Remember, the pushback is that Sanders blocked five Republican white men. So I looked up the five nominees, and they were, indeed, three Democrats and two Republicans. Why did Obama nominate two Republicans? Not clear. He probably needed to grease the skids to get the nominees through the Republican-controlled Senate.
The nominees were:
Stephen Crawford, George Washington University (Democratic donor)
James Miller III, Hoover Institute fellow and senior advisor at law firm Husch Blackwell (Republican donor)
David Michael Bennett, formerly an executive with aerospace company BAE Systems, who, by the way, is Black. He has no donor history, but sifting through his history, it tracks that he’s a Democrat.
Mickey Barnett, a lawyer and former New Mexico state senator (Republican donor)
David Shapira, chairman and CEO of supermarket chain Giant Eagle (Democratic donor, though he has donated to hometown Republicans)
So yes, there were three Democrats that could’ve been on the committee on nine-year terms, but aren’t because of Sanders’ hold on the nominations. Could that have stopped what’s happening now? Maybe not, but it sure would’ve been nice to have some eyes and ears on the inside, as Trump’s allies on the board plotted to dismantle the service.
