The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill to fund the U.S. Postal Service, amid persistent complaints from Democrats that the Trump administration is trying to sabotage the delivery of postal ballots for the November presidential election.
The Democratic bill, which passed Saturday despite opposition from Republicans, would provide $ 25 billion in support for the USPS and prioritize “first class” ballot, to ensure ballot papers arrive on time to count in an election in which the pandemic of coronavirus will cast a shadow over voices in person.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the bill was necessary to “reject the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine the postal service’s critical mission.”
On the floor of the House of Representatives, James Comer of Kentucky, the Republican rankings in the oversight committee, said the Democrats’ bill was the “result of a legislative process only less absurd than the conspiracy, insinuations and fabrications that the reason gave rise to the appointed need for it ”.
The bill is unlikely to go any further, with the Republican-held Senate reluctant. The White House has also signaled that it would veto the bill, with Republicans claiming the postal service has a lot of money on hand and is being used by Democrats for political purposes.
Democrats have accused Louis DeJoy, a major donor to Donald Trump, who is now postmaster general, of implementing austerity measures intended to carry the post, with the intention of helping Trump in the election.
Trump has falsely claimed that there is widespread fraud in post-in polls, and claims that
“Nobody knows what’s going on with the votes and the lost votes and the fraudulent votes.”
Experts have indicated that there is no evidence to support these claims and Trump has even voted multiple times via mail.
On Friday, DeJoy acknowledged that mail delivery had been slower, but refused to repair hundreds of mail sorting machines that had been removed, apparently due to a decline in supplies during the coronavirus pandemic.
However, he has reversed a plan to remove hundreds more of these machines before the election.
On Saturday, August 12, the Democratic chairman of the House Supervisory Committee, Carolyn B Maloney of New York, released internal USPS documents from a briefing to DeJoy.
Maloney said DeJoy had been warned of “steep declines and increasing delays nationwide in the last two months as a result of its drastic operational and organizational changes”.
In a statement, Maloney said: “To those who still claim that there are ‘no delays’ and that these reports are simply ‘conspiracy theories’, I hope these new data will lead them to rethink their position and support our urgent legislation today. .
“We have all seen the headlines from every corner of our country, we have read the stories and photos, we have heard directly from our constituencies, and these new documents show that the delays are much less than what we were told.”
