Source: Democracy Now!
As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls lawmakers back from summer recess for an urgent vote this week to stop changes at the U.S. Postal Service that could interfere with the upcoming election, we speak with California Congressmember Ro Khanna, who says millions of ballots could be at risk of going uncounted. “That, in my view, is a deliberate strategy to try to disqualify millions of votes and for the president to try to steal this election,” says Khanna. President Trump recently admitted he’s working to undermine the Postal Service in order to make it harder to vote by mail in November. Protests took place this weekend outside the homes of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy — a major Trump donor — who has instituted changes at the USPS that have slowed mail delivery and led to a days-long backlog in many parts of the United States, and the Postal Service sent letters to 46 states and Washington, D.C., warning that all mail-in ballots may not get delivered in time for voting.
AMY GOODMAN: All week this week, we are breaking with convention as we cover the Democratic National Convention. But we begin with the post office. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called lawmakers back from summer recess for an urgent vote this week to stop changes at the U.S. Postal Service that could interfere with the upcoming election. President Trump has admitted to working to undermine the Postal Service in order to make it harder to vote by mail in November, telling Fox News Thursday Republicans rejected a new coronavirus stimulus bill over Democrats’ demands for funding to bolster election security and $25 billion to support the Postal Service.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Now, they need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. Now, in the meantime, they aren’t getting there. By the way, those are just two items. But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting.
AMY GOODMAN: Democrats are demanding Postmaster General Louis DeJoy — a major Trump megadonor — and other top officials testify before Congress. The internal USPS watchdog is reviewing recent policy changes and DeJoy’s compliance with ethics rules — that’s according to CNN.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Post Office said Friday it would stop removing mailboxes in the run-up to the election, even as reports emerged this weekend of these boxes being removed around New York and New Jersey and other parts of the country. Last week, the Postal Service sent letters to 46 states and Washington, D.C., warning all mail-in ballots may not get delivered on time. Vice News reports internal documents show the USPS introduced plans in May to take hundreds of letter-sorting machines out of service.
On Saturday morning, protesters staged a noisy “wake-up call” demonstration outside Postmaster DeJoy’s Washington, D.C., home, chanting and banging pots and pans.
HELEN: This is openly, blatantly attempting to steal an election. OK? We are going to be voting by mail in such high numbers this year. It’s a safe way to vote. People don’t want to go to the polls in a pandemic. And Donald Trump and Louis DeJoy are saying you can’t vote by mail.
AMY GOODMAN: Protests also took place Sunday outside the Greensboro, North Carolina, residence of Postmaster DeJoy.
This all comes as the Democratic National Convention kicks off virtually today, supposedly in Milwaukee. But our next guest, Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California, will be voting no on the DNC platform. We’ll find out why, but first Ro Khanna is joining us from Washington, D.C. He’s a member of the House Oversight Committee — that’s the Committee on Oversight and Reform — where Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is set to testify a week from today.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Congressmember Khanna. Why don’t you lay out for us the crisis of the post office, with President Trump openly admitting on Fox that he is trying to defund the post office so that people cannot mail in their votes, although he and his wife plan to?
REP. RO KHANNA: Thank you. Well, it’s a very, very serious issue. And the president has seen the polling. He sees the polling that says that the overwhelming of Democrats want to vote by mail, because we’ve listened to a lot of the science and people are concerned about the safety on the pandemic, and a lot of the Republicans don’t want to vote by mail.
So his postmaster general has taken a deliberate attempt to remove vote sorting machines. Coincidentally, these vote sorting machines are being removed in battleground states. There are some reports that they’re being removed in areas where Hillary Clinton had done well.
The postmaster general has already ordered no overtime, so he’s shortening and lessening the staff time, to make it harder for ballots to get delivered on Election Day. Why does this matter? Because in the battleground states, many of the states have a law that if the ballot is not received by Election Day, that ballot doesn’t count. That is the law in Pennsylvania and in Michigan and a number of other states.
So you could see a situation where millions of people vote; their ballot is sent, even in some cases a week before; it doesn’t get to the election officer by Election Day, and it’s discarded. And that, in my view, is a deliberate strategy to try to disqualify millions of votes and for the president to try to steal this election.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you were all supposed to come back in September. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called you back earlier. Explain what’s going to happen in your committee, Congressman Khanna, in the Oversight Committee.
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, Amy, my view is we should have never left. I mean, first of all, we still have the urgent task of getting people resources. They’ve been unemployed. We don’t have the unemployment extension. We don’t have rental assistance. We don’t have a stimulus check. So we need to be in Washington.
But we need to do a few things as concerns the post office. First, it’s not enough to just at this point give the post office money. I mean, DeJoy is not going to spend that money in a way that we can trust. We need to have very specific legislation that dictates exactly what the post office needs to do — the number of staff members they need, the shifts they need, the mail sorting equipment they need. It has to be statutorily spelled out.
And I believe there needs to be criminal penalties for the Board of Governors or the postmaster general for not following that. I mean, what is absurd is you have the board governor as a former RNC chair who ran Mitch McConnell’s super PAC. It makes absolutely no sense for a mature democracy to have the post office being run currently by political hacks. And we need to have legislation that basically takes over the administration of the post office until the election.
AMY GOODMAN: Obama’s campaign manager, one of them, David Plouffe, tweeted, “1) Prime time hearings … 2) Subpoenas to Trump WH and camp officials. This is a RICO case 3) Visit local post offices with cameras–show people what is happening. 4) Events with those getting Rx late 5) Involve governors 5) No rest, no vacation. Go to war for our country.” So, if you can talk about what he’s referring to here, and this issue of getting — veterans and everyone else getting their prescriptions, the question of why Trump would be doing this, when he gets a lot of rural support, and so many people in rural areas — I mean, the post office is one of the most popular agencies in this country, older than the United States itself, 1775.
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, David Plouffe is absolutely right, and he’s been a very strong voice on this. And I do think we have to win the narrative to let people know what the president’s doing. And you’re absolutely right: It’s going to hurt him in rural communities, it’s going to hurt him in a lot of places that voted for him, because people are going to realize that it’s going to take longer for them to get their medicine, it’s going to take longer for them to get essential equipment and packages. But the challenge is that the president has calculated that that’s fine, that he’s willing to have that kind of slowdown in order to potentially disenfranchise millions of people.
So, while we have to — I agree with David Plouffe: We have to be as loud as possible of letting people know what this president is doing to the post office. We also need to solve the fundamental problem to make sure that the president can’t do it. And I don’t think political demonstration and political outrage is going to be enough. We’ve seen that this president is totally indifferent to public sentiment. So, how do we get the post office to actually follow regulatory guidelines, with the threat of criminal sanctions, to make sure that they are delivering the mail? I think that is going to be a large focus on these hearings.
AMY GOODMAN: And the fact that the postmaster general, Louis DeJoy — a megadonor for Trump, headed up funding the Republican National Convention — and his wife are major investors, to the tune of something like $75 million, perhaps to $100 million, in competitors to the post office and contractors, this didn’t come out in Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s release of documents, but in his wife, Wos, who is President Trump’s choice to be the U.S. ambassador to Canada.
REP. RO KHANNA: You’re absolutely right. I mean, they have wanted to privatize the post office for decades. I mean, as you know, it goes back to 2006, when they passed a law requiring the post office to put money away for 75 years for people’s retirement. And DeJoy was just selected to further the effort of privatization.
But this is, I think, the great debate in our nation, the erosion of any sense of public commons, the erosion of public schools, the erosion of the post office, the erosion of the town square with private funding. The Republican vision for this country is a free market absolutism, where money should dictate, private sector should dictate, in a total erosion of any public commons. And that is not going to sit well, as you pointed out, Amy, in rural communities and communities across this country that believe that we should have some social fabric.
AMY GOODMAN: The DNC, Democratic National Convention, officially kicks off tonight with a focus on the coronavirus pandemic, the economic downturn, the national uprising to demand racial justice. The lineup includes speeches from former first lady Michelle Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders, as well as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser. Joe Biden will also speak in a short video about racial justice. This comes as The Daily Beast reports there are no Muslim speakers in the DNC’s primetime lineup this week, and only a handful of Latinx voices. There are a number of Republicans; John Kasich will be speaking tonight.
Congressman Khanna, you published a column on Common Dreams titled “Why I Am Voting No on the Democratic Party Platform.” You write, “History teaches us that the Democratic Party has sometimes faced an issue so great that it alone should be the yardstick for measuring the wisdom of voting for or against the platform. This is one of those times. … I believe that moving away from a profit-based healthcare system is the moral issue of our time. And in the final analysis, because of that belief, I could not vote for a platform that lacks a clear statement supporting Medicare for All.” Explain.
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, I am very enthusiastic about supporting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to defeat Donald Trump, but I cannot vote for this platform that does not have universal healthcare as a right.
I mean, we’ve seen millions of people lose their jobs. They should not lose their healthcare. This, to me, is about basic dignity. How can you say that a person’s healthcare should be tied to whether they have a job or their employment? This was part of our platform until 1980. It was stripped during the Reagan revolution. If we can’t come around and say we are for Medicare for All in a time of a pandemic, I don’t know when we will.
And so, I’m very proud that hundreds of delegates are going to vote against this platform, while supporting Joe Biden. And I think that’s a great strength of the Democratic Party, that you can have intellectual dissent and yet have a common goal.
AMY GOODMAN: There is interesting language on Medicare for All. It says, “We are proud our party welcomes advocates who want to build on and strengthen the Affordable Care Act and those who support a Medicare for All approach; all are critical to ensuring that health care is a human right.” Do you think that if Biden were to win, although he has adamantly said he’s opposed to Medicare for All, the movements for Medicare for All — I mean, the polls show most people support this — could change him? Kamala Harris has gone back and forth on this. She said — she co-sponsored the Medicare for All bill.
REP. RO KHANNA: I do think it can change him, and especially if people who look at Bernie Sanders’s plan realize that it’s a four-year transition. I mean, Bernie Sanders isn’t saying go to Medicare for All in one year; he’s saying let’s extend it to 55, then 45, then 35. There’s a carve-out for unions. So, I think what is very possible, if we continue to advocate, that we can get the president, Biden, on year one, to say let’s extend it at least to 55 or 50, and then make progress from there. And that is why this activism is so important.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about the DNC platform committee members overwhelmingly voting against proposed language that would oppose illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and support conditioning U.S. aid if Israel moves toward annexation of the West Bank. Your thoughts on this?
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, I think we needed to make it very clear that those settlements are illegal, that any annexation is illegal. And in the past, again, there has been always the American president’s ability to say that we aren’t going to provide aid to Israel when it contradicts our policy interests or human rights. We did this — I mean, Reagan did this when Israel bombed Iraq. There was a restriction on aid. Other presidents have done it. George Bush Sr. did it on loan guarantees. So, this is not something far out from our party’s tradition.
And I do think there needs to be a clear statement on Palestinian rights. I think we need to speak out more clearly with the UAE-Israel agreement. I mean, it’s a good thing anytime countries are at peace, but that cannot be at the expense of Palestinian rights. UAE, as you know, has been responsible, in part, for the Yemen bombing. And there has to be clarity that there’s no annexation, and clarity that both countries are going to be recognizing Palestinian rights. Palestinians can’t be the collateral damage of great power politics in the Middle East.
AMY GOODMAN: Congressman Khanna, you are calling for a bill that would make free masks available to all. You also have written a letter, along with Congressman Adam Schiff, to the leadership, requesting mask-related provisions in any COVID-19 pandemic relief package. Explain.
REP. RO KHANNA: The data is so clear that mask usage will help prevent the spread of coronavirus. And we’ve seen in other countries where there have had — where there have been universal masks, in Taiwan, in South Korea, they have done very well in dealing with this pandemic.
So, what we are saying is we should be giving every person who wants them masks. This is our responsibility. When I go vote in the United States Congress, they give me a mask. Why can’t every worker who’s doing that have that option? It, A, serves as a reminder to them about the importance, and, B, it makes sure that they have these masks if they’re doing jobs that are putting them at risk.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Senator Harris, the new VP, the presumptive VP nominee, from your state, California, she is also, like you, Indian American, as well as African American, Caribbean American. Your thoughts?
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, it’s a matter of great pride. I mean, her story is so inspiring. Her mother, an immigrant from India. My parents were immigrants. And the fact that she could, through sheer hard work and public service, rise up and today be hopefully the next vice president of the United States is inspirational. And it is a glimpse into our multiracial, multiethnic future — a total difference than Donald Trump.
I will say one thing on the total obliviousness to history that Donald Trump and people there have shown. I mean, Trump’s favorite president is Andrew Jackson, who has a very checkered history and record. But Jackson was the son of two immigrants. His brothers were born in foreign countries. So, to be attacking Kamala Harris is not just racist, it actually displays an ignorance about American history.
AMY GOODMAN: Ro Khanna, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Democratic congressmember from California, member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
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