This Washington Post article describes how Sen. Bernard Sanders (Independent-Vermont) collaborated with Senate Majority Leader Sen. A. Mitchell McConnell Jr. (Republican-Kentucky) to block Obama’s appointments to the Postal Service’s governing boards, which left a clean slate for Trump to appoint his cronies.
[quote]Then, as now, the Postal Service proposed steep service cuts that included closing post office branches and mail-sorting plants and eliminating Saturday delivery.
Sanders decried the cuts. Buoyed by the politically potent postal unions, he led the charge in the Senate to forestall them.
Foremost among his actions was a Senate hold to block Obama’s slate of five nominees to the board. The senator’s aides said at the time that he thought that the two Republicans, a lobbyist for the payday loan industry and a former Reagan administration official, would slash jobs and outsource one of the country’s oldest institutions to private companies.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) held the entire slate from a vote on the Senate floor. The hold lasted two years. By the time Trump took office in January 2017, the last remaining members were off the board.[/quote]
This is an example of Sanders’s political unreliability and why he would make for an ineffective president.
He’s not a candidate for president. He was trying to prevent what Trump and the Republicans ended up doing anyway, I don’t know why this is worthy of mention.
Because it demonstrates a short-sightedness that has done real harm to the nation and while he is not running for president, he is an elected official.
Almost everybody in Washington made decisions based on a miscalculation of Trump’s chances of being elected in 2016. McConnell was one of the few who didn’t.
Find me an officeholder who hasn’t made a decision like that. If he had approved Obama’s nominees and Trump used them to tear down the USPS you would have the same complaints.
Given that he has an ongoing career in politics, and still has something of a following, and that there are a significant number of people who still believe he should have been nominated, I think it’s perfectly fair to evaluate any of his decisions that seem to reflect on his judgement and political skill and even those that have resulted in consequences.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong on this, but a hold can be defeated by a cloture vote, and a cloture vote for a presidential nominee is a simple majority.
So if a simple majority in the Senate had wanted to approve those nominations it would have happened. You could blame Sanders for using a procedural tactic that made the optics better for the GOP majority to block the nominations, but I don’t think you can blame him for the fact that the nominations were blocked.
If someone had given Bernie this level of veto power over nominations, I’d have more of a problem with him not using it on every Trump nomination since 2017.
I’ve never seen the profit in blaming someone for unintended consequences.
You can never see the future, you will always make mistakes. To hold someone to account for any decisions means to make them not make any decisions, for fear that something could come back to bite them.
From what I saw, the post office was going to undergo a bunch of cuts. He worked to prevent that, and succeeded.
Now the Post Office is getting a bunch of cuts, and that’s being blamed on him?
I never really liked Sanders, but this really does seem like some pretty serious reaching for something to hate on him for.
Well, when he makes a decision that undermines our democracy and when he has a history of making poor decisions without thinking through the consequences and when he leads a movement that does the same, yes, yes we do.
I really don’t think that this was a decision that “undermines our democracy”. It was a decision to prevent the post office from being cut. That preventing cuts a couple years ago didn’t prevent cuts today is a poor argument that it undermined our democracy.
Like I said, I never really liked him, far more idealistic than practical, but I don’t think that you could find a single politician anywhere that you could not blame the unintended consequences of some action on them. No one can think through all the possible consequences of an action.
I think he should have had corn flakes rather than a bagel this morning for breakfast. You? (And don’t even get me started on his wardrobe choices.)
The profit comes from occasionally when people learn that there can be unintended consequences and then exhibit more caution and more comprehensive planning that would account for them.
Sure, if he had known the future, he should have acted differently.
But his reasoning was to prevent cuts at the post office that were being proposed at that time. What planning would have taken into account that Trump would win office (this was before Trump was even running for office), and use this opening to make cuts to the post office.
I suppose that if he let them do the cuts to the post office back in '14, then they wouldn’t have to do them now.
Plus, the Republicans controlled the senate at the time, so Sander’s actions weren’t even necessary. McConnell could have held it up on his own.
I’m just not really seeing the there there. The OP wants me to hate Sanders because of this, but I really can’t find myself to care. Compared to my disagreements with Sanders on nuclear power, this is precisely nothing.
Wait so your beef is that Sanders wasn’t ok with this? He was right. That’s a fox in the hen-house if I’ve ever seen one.
If you told someone in 2015 that in 2020 President Trump would be dismantling the postal service to damage the capacity to vote during a pandemic you’d be laughed off. That would be street-corner level rambling at the time.
Can someone splain to me the tenure of the Postmaster General and the Board of Governors? Are they appointed for fixed terms? Do they serve at the pleasure of the president? Can the president dismiss any of them at any time? Or can he dismiss any of them but only for cause?
If Biden becomes president, can he summarily dismiss any or all of them and appoint a new slate?
“. . . he thought that the two Republicans, a lobbyist for the payday loan industry and a former Reagan administration official, would slash jobs and outsource one of the country’s oldest institutions to private companies.”
And so when a different set of board members does just that, it’s somehow Sanders’ fault? What if he was right, and the dismantling would have begun in part pre-Trump? Maybe he actually delayed the destruction of the PO by two years. Why is McConnell’s hold on the entire slate for two years Sanders’ fault? Why was Obama unable to come up with a different slate for two years?