No DeJoy In Mudville

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy thought he could get away with cutting back post office hours, taking away mailboxes, and cutting back on overtime. He was wrong. The public outcry against his "reforms" has been so great that he now says he will halt his actions until after the 2020 election. Mail processing facilities won't be closed before then, hours at post offices would stay the same, and overtime would be approved "as needed."

DeJoy (above) may have been wrong about being able to do all of this with no opposition form the public, but not as wrong as he will be if he thinks this move will take the heat off him. Nancy Pelosi, for one, isn't satisfied.  She noted that DeJoy's about-face does not restore changes already made, stops only a few of his proposed changes, and does not go far enough to ensure that mail-in ballots for the election will be fairly counted.  So, he can still expect to have to appear before the House Oversight Committee meeting on August 24, and he even has to face a Senate panel.  And the House is going ahead with a vote on a bill to keep the Postal Service afloat.

I don't yet have full confidence that an election can be held with the guarantee that all mail-in ballots will be counted.  But I'm closer to having it after all of this news.

I gotta hand it to Trump, though, because even though the Postal Service was created out of the old Post Office Department in part to take the power of appointing the Postmaster General - a position that pre-dates American independence and first held by Benjamin Franklin - out of the hands of the President, Trump simply appointed sycophants to the Postal Service's board of governors to ensure the selection of his right-hand man for the job.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy is sending mail-in ballots out to all of the stat's registered voters as soon as possible.