Pelosi Calls House Back To Session Early To Tackle ‘Devastating Effects’ Of Trump’s USPS Changes

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) holds her weekly press conference on Capitol Hill in on May 28, 2020. (Photo by NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images)
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) informed her Democratic colleagues on Sunday night that the House would be called back to session this week to curtail the Trump-appointed Postmaster General’s structural changes at the United States Postal Service (USPS) that threaten to cause delays that could invalidate Americans’ mail-in votes.

In a letter to House Democrats, Pelosi slammed the “devastating effects” of President Donald Trump’s “campaign to sabotage the election by manipulating the Postal Service to disenfranchise voters,” of which Postmaster General Louis DeJoy “has proven a complicit crony.”

The Democratic leader also noted that the changes could also prevent people from receiving crucial medicine and payments in the mail on time.

“Lives, livelihoods and the life of our American Democracy are under threat from the President,” the Democratic leader wrote. “That is why I am calling upon the House to return to session later this week to vote on Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Maloney’s ‘Delivering for America Act,’ which prohibits the Postal Service from implementing any changes to operations or level of service it had in place on January 1, 2020.”

The restructuring at the USPS directed by DeJoy, a Trump and GOP donor, include the removal of several mail-sorting machines and reduction of overtime for postal workers. Democrats have criticized DeJoy’s changes, accusing him of deliberately delaying the agency’s operations to sabotage states’ mail-in voting systems, which Trump has baselessly claimed causes election fraud.

The USPS has warned multiple states that their mail-in ballots may arrive too late to be counted in the November elections.

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