Protect Our USPS -- Again

The Postal Clause, Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution, known as the Postal Clause or the Postal Power, was enacted in 1792 when Congress passed the “Postal Service Act.” This Act established the Post Office Department. The republican party is still going after what they consider the holy grail of large unions and doing everything it can to bust the United States Postal Service’s (USPS) union at a loss of thousands of good paying jobs. There are two current factors pushing this effort to destroy the USPS. One cause of the current attack is based on the thin-skinned crybaby occupying the White House. His revenge against Jeff Bezo, who happens to own both Amazon and the Washington Post, is one driving force behind the current attack. The Post runs articles telling the truth about Trump so, in retaliation, Trump is demanding the Postal Service triple or quadruple shipping costs for Amazon packages and the Postal Services gets caught in the middle of these two 1 percenters pissing contest. The other factor is that Trump also doesn’t want people to vote by mail because he fears he’d lose in a landslide. Only 22 states currently have vote by mail, and in some of these states, not all elections fall under the mail-in ballots. The GOP would have us believe mail-in voting is fraught with abuse and fraud and impractical; however, the U.S. military has been voting by mail for a very long time. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln implemented the vote by mail in the 1860s to allow soldiers to vote from the battlefield. In 1929, Congress passed the HR 26 to allow vote by mail. In 1931, the House and Senate passed HJR 159, followed by voter approval in 1932. In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to protect the rights of all voters. And, the GOP has been trying to destroy these rights ever since, and now it’s involving the USPS. Don’t believe the GOP lies that the USPS is going broke. This is not the first time the Postal Service has been under attack by the GOP, during the George W. Bush administration, Darrell Issa, a former republican congressman from Southern California, went after the USPS in an effort to cause it to fail so it could then be privatized. In 2006, Congress passed a law forcing the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to cover the future costs of retirement healthcare 75 years in advance. The GOP plan was to bankrupt the Postal Service and privatize it to FedEx, a privately owned, nonunion company started in 1973, that the government began using to circumvent the Postal Service. Now is the perfect time for the largest unions to be talking about actions to bring the GOP to their knees while people are stuck in their homes due to the virus they allowed to get out of control. If the Postal union joined forces with the Longshoremen, Teamsters, Teachers and other unions, there would be hell to pay. This effort has the potential to shut down the entire country. Just the threat alone could put the fear into the greedy politicians’ to stop their attack on the Postal Service. If we don’t stop the union-busting GOP now, the rest of unions will be next. They will pick off the remaining unions one by one, but they can’t if we send together. Remember the words of Martin Niemöller, “… And then they came for us.”