Maybe our Senior Senator has this bug up his ass because he knows he will be retiring in 2018, God willing. But Senator Carper has been most annoying over the last two months, screaming about bipartisanship to anyone who can hear him. He realized his career-long dream to create a non-contiguous and non-existent Delaware National Park this past Saturday. So now he is itching to get his actually good Postal Reform bill passed by this Congress. Indeed, there were some reports that he tried to get the Reform bill passed by adding it to the CROmibus bill that passed the Senate last Saturday.
Government Executive Magazine Correspondent Eric Katz reported Carper attempted to connect the USPS legislation to a spending bill in a last ditch effort to get the measure passed this year. “He sort of tried to strong arm the senators and his [D]emocratic colleagues into getting on board,” Katz said he learned from his Washington sources.
Carper, however, told WDEL that’s “hogwash.”
“We did everything we could have thought of, but he idea of trying to put it into a bill of that nature, I don’t think that makes a whole lot of sense,” Carper said. “At any rate, we narrowed our differences further and I am very encouraged that when we come back in the new year, we’ll be able to deal with this right away.”
The reason why the US Postal Service is in trouble is because of the Postal Reform Act of 2006, passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by a Republican President. The Act was purposely designed to bankrupt the USPS, due to a requirement in the law that forces the USPS to aggressively prefund its future retirees. It was not a long deliberated piece of legislation. It was introduced in one House of Congress on December 7, 2006, and signed into law by President Bush on December 20, 2006. 13 days. It passed by voice vote in the House and unanimous consent in the Senate. That means Tom Carper voted to bankrupt the Post Office, I guess because it was something the Republicans wanted in their last days in the majority after being trounced in the 2006 Midterms, and Carper went along just to be “bipartisan.”
I bet everything I own that that was Carper’s reason to consent to the 2006 Act. Just to be bipartisan. Because to Carper, being bipartisan is a goal in and of itself, no matter the horrible policy that flows from it.
But to Carper’s credit, he is trying to correct that horrible mistake. And I would give him credit for it. Except….
Sen. Tom Carper criticized the timing of President Barack Obama’s executive order on immigration Tuesday, saying Congress could have fully funded the Homeland Security Department had Obama waited.
The Delaware Democrat, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in an interview he supports Obama’s Nov. 20 order protecting up to 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation.
But he said he tried to persuade the administration that Congress “could get a whole lot more done” during the lame-duck session if the order’s Nov. 20 rollout were postponed until Christmas Eve.
Had Obama agreed to that delay, Carper said, the fiscal 2015 federal spending bill Congress sent him Saturday would not have specified that the Homeland Security Department will be funded only through February rather than through the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year.
Instead, the bill leaves the department “hanging out there, yet again, on a stop-and-go budget that has been demoralizing for employees, that is wasteful in terms of our resources and diminishes the kind of results that we’re seeking,” Carper said.
Actually, Senator, President Obama did wait. For you cowardly Senate and House Democrats. You asked him to wait because you were all worried about electoral fallout. So you made the President piss off his base, which in turn depressed the Democratic vote, which turn lost you the Senate in the election. Seriously, Senator Carper, you have the political instincts of a blade of grass. Perhaps if the President did not delay and announced his immigration order in September as was originally planned, perhaps Mr. Carper would still be in the majority right now.
It is not the President’s fault that that agency is now unfunded. It is the Republican’s. They decided to un-fund it. So fucking blame them. But that is verboten in the Carper brain. Republicans can never be blamed for anything they do. If Republicans do something, it is because Obama made them do it, and so Carper blames Obama. That is like someone blaming the battered wife for her husband hitting her, because only if she got the food on the table faster…