It has become obvious over the last few months that Darrell Issa doesn’t have the votes from his own party to pass his bill to more or less dismantle the US Postal Service as we know it. Rural voters who tend to vote Republican also seem to be pretty attached to their post offices. (Sort of like the teabaggers who rail against socialism as they cash their Social Security checks!)
According to The Hill, though, there’s another reason the House GOP hasn’t acted- they apparently remembered that the “crisis” wasn’t a real crisis!
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) suggested, in his last news conference before Congress broke for August, that the House had delayed dealing with postal reform because USPS was able to keep its head above water.
“The postal legislation, there’s a lot of conversation about it,” Boehner said Thursday. “But, you know, these missed payments are not going to affect the ability of the post office to do its job.”
When you keep repeating phrases like “losing $25 million a day” constantly, you can forget that it’s just an arbitrary number you and your cronies conjured up back in 2006, not actual cash going out the door.
It’s refreshing to see that Boehner has dropped the pretense that there’s an imminent postal “crisis”. Unfortunately for the USPS, its employees and business partners, though, it probably means that Congress will do nothing about the USPS until there really is a genuine cash crisis- by which time it may be too late.
via House GOP: Uncertainty over Post Office finances delaying reforms – The Hill's On The Money.
