By Karen Rubin, News-Photos-Features.com
Donald Trump thinks that if he describes the high crime and misdemeanor out loud and commits it in the open, no one will hold him accountable for the crime. And so far, that has really worked for him, with Republicans refusing to hold him accountable after he was impeached in the House, saying that removing a president is up to the voters (wink, wink).
Which brings us now to the US Postal Service. Trump said out loud that he will cripple, even effectively shut down the US Postal Service by starving it of funding, workers (disproportionately affected as essential frontline workers by COVID-19) and equipment, in order to prevent absentee election ballots from being delivered and posted in time, in order to make universal mail-in-voting impossible (as an option on top of in-person) to mitigate against the public health threat of the coronavirus.
Doesn’t it strike anyone odd that three months before Election Day, the Post Office informed 46 states not to expect ballots to be received in a timely way? You would think that management that cared and purports to be business management geniuses would instead work out procedures to insure ballots would be expeditiously delivered. But without notice, explanation or rule-making, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a mega-donor to Trump and the Republicans with no actual postal experience (not unlike EU Ambassador Gordon “Ukraine” Sondland and Ambassador to UK Robert “Turnberry” Wood Johnson IV, whose only qualifications were donating big money to Trump and promising blind fealty), ordered 671 sorting machines destroyed, each one costing $1 million, each one capable of processing 30,000 pieces of mail each hour. Really unclear how removing those machines would save money or expedite mail.
What else did DeJoy do immediately upon being installed in May? Under the guise of wanting “on-time” performance, he ordered trucks to leave on schedule, even if they hadn’t been loaded yet for lack of adequate personnel, leaving mail on the dock to wait another day or days, and not allowing return trips. On-time performance is not the same as on-time delivery.
It has long been a goal of Republicans to privatize the postal service – making it a cash cow for investors just as Internet providers have become – and to make that happen in 2006, required the USPS to pre-fund 75 years of pension – something no other agency or even company has had to do (yet when private companies go bankrupt, taxpayers pick up the tab for pensions). The post office, funded entirely by revenues (not taxes) and enjoying 91 percent approval, is now $69 billion in the red. While Republicans have long crusaded to destroy the Post Office (not incidentally, a major employer of people of color and women as well as veterans who are also union members)Trump’s aversion to the USPS was magnified because of his grudge against Jeff Bezos (who owns the Washington Post) and Amazon (the source of Bezos’ wealth and power).
But the USPS was founded as one of the earliest institutions in the nation (by Ben Franklin) as essential to uniting the former colonies, promoting citizenship and commerce, and even enshrined it in the Constitution. It was designed as a “service,” not a for-profit “business”. It receives no taxpayer funding (until COVID) but is capped by Congress in what it can charge and the services it can do (there have long been proposals to allow post offices to function as rural banks). It costs just 55c to mail a letter from New York to Hawaii or Alaska; the minimum cost for FedEx is $25.
High proportions of seniors and 80 percent of veterans depend on the mail to deliver life-saving prescription medications, Social Security and pension checks, getand pay credit card bills in a timely way, and especially now with the pandemic keeping people isolated, to get deliveries of mail order.
The Veterans Administration has actually had to resort to much more expensive Fed Ex and UPS to deliver life-saving medications in a timely way — how is that saving taxpayers money? Small businesses, forced to adapt to COVID-19 by doing more mail-order, are seeing their deliveries slowed or forced to use more expensive for-profit services, hurting even further their ability to compete with Amazon and Walmart (which have really been racking up with the coronavirus).
Trump and Dejoy are perpetrating an outright lie that the USPS cannot accommodate that volume of mail. But each day, the USPS handles 181 MILLION pieces of mail (500 million letters a day during Christmas). So suggesting that the mail-in vote cannot be accommodated is intended to discourage people from voting by mail while also afraid for their life of voting in person.
Here’s a concern: DeJoy may be cowered (all Trump’s corrupt moneybags fold like wet noodles) with the uproar over his criminal behavior to stop removing collection boxes or sorting machines, but that doesn’t stop him from selectively, strategically disrupting mail service in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods. And is he restoring what he already removed? He told the Senate committee he would not.
Among DeJoy’s policies to sabotage the election, he has said that absentee ballots will no longer be given the highest priority of first-class mail, meaning they are set aside like those advertising circulars.
This is at the same time Trump is trying to exert executive orders to ban counting absentee ballots received after Election Day, even if they were postmarked in a timely way. Get it?
DeJoy, in his appearance before the Senate Homeland Security & Government Oversight committee on Friday, August 21, basically told a series of lies to disguise his involvement in what mounts to a conspiracy with Trump and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to suppress mail-in voting. Among them, that the plans to dismantle sorting machines and remove collection boxes was already in place when he arrived in June; that the decision was made by top managers (he fired 23 of them while the Deputy Attorney General quit when DeJoy was appointed). He also most likely lied when he “pledged” that election mail would be handled with the highest priority as first class mail (as it has been). But when the election is over, and Trump has managed to squeak by with the same 42 percent of the popular vote, losing perhaps by six million instead of the measly three million that still denied Hillary Clinton the presidency, because of tilting the vote in the battleground states to again take the Electoral College, DeJoy will say “My bad,” and expect to be pardoned by a re-anointed Trump.
Louis DeJoy is the 2020 version of with Wally O’Dell, the CEO of Diebold voting machines, who in 2004 when e-voting predominated, pledged to deliver Ohio, crucial for reelection, to Bush and miraculously, he did!. But in 2020, with the coronavirus pandemic making in-person voting so risky, 50% of the 165 million votes cast may well be by absentee (mail-in) ballot (up from 25% in 2016), so DeJoy has an extraordinary opportunity to decide which ballots get delivered in a timely way, and which just manage to fall off a truck, as in the Wisconsin primary. Trump calculates he only needs to upset a mere who-would-miss-them 23,000 votes in five battleground states including Wisconsin to take the Electoral College. As Michelle Obama noted in her DNC speech, in one crucial battleground state in 2016, it only took two votes per precinct to take that state’s electoral votes.
What’s at stake though isn’t just Trump, a clear-and-present-danger to the nation and global security, once again squeaking a win by stealing the Electoral College (so far my prediction of 42% popular vote is holding up), it’s also Moscow Mitch McConnell winning his election and keeping the Senate majority, Republicans possibly retaking control of the House, taking over more State Legislators in time to double-down on gerrymandering that enables Republicans to control 55% of legislatures with only 45% of the vote. And then there is the continued crusade to populate the Supreme Court and the entire judiciary with unqualified, ideological right-wing fanatics who will decide how the rest of us live for the next 50 years.
What can be done? The USPS is overseen by a Board of Governors headed by Robert M. Duncan, a former RNC chairman (five out of six have ties to RNC or Trump). But they still have a fiduciary responsibility, so if the Postmaster General is literally conspiring and committing crimes (obstructing election, interfering with mail delivery) they should be prosecuted for breaching fiduciary responsibility and abetting criminal activity.
DeJoy should be prosecuted under RICO as part of a criminal conspiracy – though in this, as in the now clear collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to steal the 2016 campaign, there is no specific contract, just, as with all Mafioso, the implied understanding. As it turns out DeJoy also has massive conflict of interest issues, with some $30 million in investments in USPS competitors. And then there’s that little issue of lying under oath to Congress, though I suspect DeJoy expects to obtain the same “courtesy” from Attorney General Barr as Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. And then, DeJoy would join a growing club of Trump and RNC aides, allies, officials, staff indicted, prosecuted, imprisoned, or needing to resign in disgrace including Steve Wynn, Elliott Broidy, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon.
Who should bring lawsuits? Certainly Trump’s consigliere Attorney General William Barr, who sees his role as protecting Trump, will do nothing to protect the rights of Americans. But the state attorneys general can prosecute DeJoy AND Trump. Indeed, at this writing, some 20 states have filed suit.
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