August 16, 2020
We barely had the time to celebrate the historic selection of Senator Kamala Harris as the first Black and first Asian-American woman Vice Presidential nominee on a major party ticket before we were confronted by a threat to democracy so grave and so immediate that there was no time for Black women to bask in being seen for the first time as leaders, rather than mere workhorses tasked with getting out the vote with $20 and a Kinko’s credit card from the DNC. There was no time to refute the racists and insecure Hoteps who questioned Kamala’s blackness. There was no time to pen a painstaking refutation of those who found Harris’s past as a prosecutor disqualifying per se, or to answer critics who distorted her record to depict it as uniformly bad, rather than a mix of positive and disappointing decisions that are almost inevitable in that job. Jamelle Bouie defended her blackness here. Public defender, Niki Solis, ably defended her prosecutorial record here and Jacob Rosenberg cautioned us about the risk inherent in pinning our hopes for change even on those widely acknowledged as progressive prosecutors.
We don’t have time to pop bottles of Veuve in celebration or to recapitulate those arguments because Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy are aggressively dismantling the Postal Service in front of our eyes in their zeal to rig the election in Trump’s favor. Since DeJoy’s appointment in June, he has instituted policies, like eliminating overtime and reassigning experienced Postal Service executives, that have already created backlogs and delays, (Source: “Postal Service overhauls leadership as Democrats press for investigation of mail delays,” by Jacob Bogage, The Washington Post, 8/7/20). On Thursday, Trump admitted to blocking emergency funding for the Postal Service, telling Maria Bartiromo on Fox that, “if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it,” (Source: “Trump admits he’s blocking postal cash to stop mail-in votes,” by Deb Riechmann and Anthony Izaguirre, APnews.com, 8/13/20).
Later that day, we learned that the Postal Service was inexplicably dismantling and removing sorting machines from postal facilities, rendering it more difficult for postal workers to quickly process the mail, (Source: “The Post Office is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election, by Aaron Gordon, Vice.com, 8/13/20). We also learned that they were removing dozens of mailboxes in places as disparate as rural Montana, Portland, Oregon, NewYork City and suburban New Jersey.
While any one of these moves might be defensible in isolation, taken together they paint a clear picture of a concerted effort to create chaos and dysfunction in a constitutionally mandated, vastly popular federal agency that is vital to the proper functioning of democracy, (Source: “The Post Office Is Essential to American Democracy: Now More Than Ever,” by Michael Meeropol, WAMC.org, 8/7/20).
There is no time to waste. Both Congress and ordinary citizens must step up the pressure to reverse these moves and jettison DeJoy. New Jersey Congressman Bill Pascrell has made a criminal referral to the state Attorney General on the grounds that DeJoy and Trump are violating New Jersey law by intentionally interfering with the administration of elections.
DeJoy’s actions are also arguably violations of federal statutes prohibiting mail tampering (18 U.S.C. §1701), and while no one expects Bill Barr’s Department of Justice to indict DeJoy, it is worth noting that the statute of limitations for mail tampering is five years. In addition, DeJoy should be challenged under the Administrative Procedure Act (5 U.S.C. §551)for abusing his discretion and implementing policies designed to cripple the timely delivery of the mail. Veterans and senior citizens who depend on the mail for delivery of lifesaving medications would certainly have a cause of action.
The truth, though, is that accountability through our system takes time, which we don’t have a lot of. In order to thwart the Republicans’ plan to rig this election, we need to get our ballots in at the earliest possible date (state by state info available here). If the events of the last week haven’t convinced us that we don’t have the luxury of celebrating Kamala for making history or denigrating her for being too moderate, we are living in an alternate universe. The choice before us is as simple as it is stark- authoritarian apartheid state or flawed democracy? It’s all on us.
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