Nancy Pelosi had an emergency leadership call with other House members Saturday and she is seriously considering cutting short the month long recess, to address the issue of Donald Trump dismantling the post office. Literally, his postmaster general is ripping mail boxes off the sidewalk and carrying them away in trucks, while inside postal facilities, he removes sorting machines and lets mail pile up. This is not a time to go on vacation. Trump and his henchmen are meddling while democracy burns. And Pelosi herself is right in the middle of it, taking incoming fire.
Wasn't one of the MAJOR points of winning back the House in 2018 that Democrats would have the power to do the right thing when it needed to be done?
You don't need Senate or White House approval to do ANY of the things listed below.
You can do them RIGHT NOW! https://t.co/H1pDOLEuLD
— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) August 15, 2020
And it got considerably worse than that, if you want to go over to Twitter and see for yourself. So Pelosi got cracking, and the House could return to vote within the next two weeks, instead of the previously scheduled date of September 14. Politico:
Democrats are looking to address organizational issues at the Postal Service in the coming weeks, not to provide additional funding at this time, according to sources familiar with the discussion.
One option would be to vote on a modified version of a bill introduced by House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) earlier this week that would prohibit USPS from implementing a planned organizational overhaul that critics maintain would handicap mail-in voting.
Other top Democrats also floated addressing other issues, including expired federal unemployment benefits and voting rights. But Democratic sources said the immediate focus — at least for now — is preserving the Postal Service ahead of the election.
On Friday, Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) issued a scathing statement accusing President Donald Trump and Republicans of waging an “all-out assault on the Postal Service and its role in ensuring the integrity of the 2020 election.” Their statement came after Trump said he opposes a federal infusion of funds to save the flailing postal service because he doesn’t support mail-in voting.
“The President made plain that he will manipulate the operations of the Post Office to deny eligible voters the ballot in pursuit of his own re-election,” Pelosi and Schumer said. “The President’s own words confirm: he needs to cheat to win.”
The simple fact is that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. No elected official should be on a month long hiatus when the government is in the condition it’s in, with unemployment insurance benefits in flux, the spiking pandemic, and most of all, Trump and his mega donor appointee deconstructing the post office and the November election along with it. That is the one thing that has to come to a screeching halt as soon as humanly possible.
Being one of the (too) few North Carolinians with a Democratic Representative I already contacted mine after what I saw on Maddow (and then Velshi) last night and will be calling Monday morning. (and Tillis – who I called and wrote to earlier in the week) Since Trump wants to upstage the Democratic Convention by holding events every day next week, we should have OUR Representatives back in DC in the House upstaging HIM.
I think they should call Dejoy to the carpet soon. I’d like to see him impeached if he doesn’t show up. And locked up or something.
Why does she need to debate? There’s all the evidence she needs in the news already. (And in her mailboxes.)
The debate is on the actual gameplan rather than whether or not to do anything. Unlike Trump, she actually thinks before she acts and she’s rarely steered us wrong so far since getting the gavel back. So…a little faith please?
Dear sweet Ghu, she should have been planning as soon as this hit Twitter and blogs, days ago. There are people in Congress who are ahead of her already.
And do you think that those Congress folk made those moves without her full knowledge or approval? Or that maybe she needed to get a full sense of what the landscape looked like right now so she could go with the best approach? This is something we cannot afford to eff up, lest you give the Orange Toddler yet more leverage. So I’m trusting that she has this in hand.
They’re going to do something on this, let’s be clear. Doing nothing is the option Trump would go for, which means they shall do the opposite. That said, could EVERYBODY please refrain (I mean you too, Winslow) from acting like there’s a magic wand solution to this mess?
I trust that speaker Pelosi has this in hand, she doesn’t make stupid uninformed decisions like trump. I really hate twitter, everyone expects things to get done in the time it takes to complain by tweet.
I don’t get it: the country’s in dire need of leadership & Congress goes on vacation? My respect for Nancy Pelosi’s enormous but I don’t get why she doesn’t just call her troops back RIGHT NOW, thereby showing up the lazyass GOPers & demonstrating to the people that the Democrats are willing to actually do some work on their behalf. And yes, issue some serious subpoenas for the likes of this arsehole DeJoy, get him in front of TV cameras to answer a few questions about his mandate from Trump to cripple our post office.
So it’s Sunday, and she called a hearing. Good for Pelosi. The question is whether DeJoy will show up. Will donnie obstruct again?
To this I would add the question, WHY are Pelosi and Schumer negotiating with two unelected, unqualified knuckleheads from the White House instead of Moscow Mitch and Kevlar McCarthy? Mitch hasn’t done a day’s work in the Senate since he got there.
*Because * McTurtle won’t do anything but confirm racist POS judges. Munchkin isn’t clueless about the economy – but he can’t speak for the WH or the GOP-T. Meadows is a RWNJ, and knows what he’s been told to say, but that’s his limit.
Not one Congress person should be anywhere but in D.C. People, with no income coming in, can’t go anywhere. I contacted her office. I raised hell. Not that my doing that made a difference but maybe a bunch of other folks did too.
So Pelosi is in an uproar about all this mess. What about the mess the country is in? We need some help with a stimulus check like yesterday!!
Now she’ll do it. Maloney has already called her committee to meet on the 24th, and told DeJoy to show up with answers.