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The United States House of Representatives has passed a bill to fund the United States Postal Service, amid continued complaints from Democrats that the Trump administration is trying to sabotage the delivery of mail-in ballots ahead of the presidential election November.
The Democratic bill, which passed Saturday despite opposition from Republicans, would provide $ 25 billion in aid to the USPS and prioritize election mail as “first class,” to ensure that Ballots arrive in time to be counted in an election in which the coronavirus pandemic will occur casting a shadow over in-person voting.
Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, said the bill was necessary to “reject the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine the critical mission of the Postal Service.”
On the House floor, James Comer of Kentucky, the senior Republican on the oversight committee, said the Democrats’ bill was “the result of a legislative process hardly less absurd than conspiracies, innuendo and the fabrications which gave rise to the so-called need ”.
The bill is unlikely to make any further progress as the Republican Senate does not want it to. The White House has also indicated it will veto the bill, with Republicans saying the Postal Service has a lot of money on hand and is being used by Democrats for political purposes.
Democrats accused Louis DeJoy, a major donor to Donald Trump who is now the Postmaster General, of implementing cost-cutting measures designed to slow mail, with the intention of helping Trump to the election.
Trump falsely claimed there was widespread fraud in mail-in ballots, claiming that
“Nobody knows what happens with the ballots, the lost ballots and the fraudulent ballots.”
Experts stressed that there was no evidence to support these claims and that Trump himself had voted several times by mail himself.
On Friday, DeJoy admitted that mail delivery had slowed down but refused to put back hundreds of mail sorting machines that were phased out, apparently due to lower deliveries during the coronavirus pandemic.
He, however, canceled a plan to remove hundreds more of these machines before the election.
On Saturday, Democratic Chair of the House Oversight Committee, Carolyn B Maloney of New York City, released internal USPS documents during a briefing in DeJoy on August 12.
Maloney said DeJoy had been warned of “steep declines and increasing delays across the country over the past two months due to his drastic operational and organizational changes.”
In a statement, Maloney said: “To those who still claim there are ‘no delays’ and that these reports are just ‘conspiracy theories’, I hope this new data leads them to rethink their position and support our urgent legislation today.
“We’ve all seen the headlines from all over our country, we’ve read the stories and seen the photos, we’ve heard directly from our constituents, and these new documents show that the delays are far worse than we are being told. said.
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