An old line from an old show keeps coming back to me as the White House continues to wage a political power struggle with the U.S. Postal Service.
The line comes from an episode of Seinfeld. Maybe you recall it.
It’s the one when the always cunning and conniving postal carrier character Newman begs the show’s star and namesake Jerry Seinfeld to ask his hearing-impaired girlfriend, played by actress Marlee Matlin, to help Newman read his supervisor’s lips.
Actor Wayne Knight plays the fictional mailman and Seinfeld’s neighbor and nemesis on the show. In this scene, he busts through Jerry’s apartment door during the 1993 episode and pleads with Jerry to help him out.
"You’ve got to let me use her for one day," Newman says. "Just one day!"
"Can’t do it, Newman," Jerry says.
"But Jerry, we’ve got this new supervisor down at the post office working behind this glass. I know they’re talking about me. I know they’re going to transfer me. I know it! Two hours. Just give me two hours!"
Jerry still refuses: "It’s not gonna happen!"
Distraught and dejected, Newman walks away and lashes back at Jerry with a parting shot.
"All right, all right. But you remember this…"
Then comes the line that has recently been running through my mind.
"When you control the mail, you control … information."
This was one of many memorable one-liners from the "show about nothing" that rose to television prominence during the ’90s. Back then, it was amusing and was said in jest.
Today, it’s not as funny and it gives me pause amid the recent turmoil within the nation’s postal service. Postal employees with many years of carrying and delivering the mail have recently complained that their current leadership has cut their overtime and has also asked them to do the unthinkable: to hold on to any mail they can’t deliver on their routes within regular business hours and leave any undelivered mail for another day.
So, the U.S. Postal Service, with its origins dating back to the American Revolution, an institution known for its credo to never allow "snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night" to delay deliveries, is suddenly backing off away from its centuries-old mission of relentless reliability?
These were the orders from U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. His appointment two months ago as the leader of the country’s postal system has been a controversial one. He is one of five postmasters general in the past 50 years to come from the private sector.
DeJoy has never worked a day in the postal service. His background is in business. He took over his father’s 10-employee trucking business in the 1980s and grew the company into a national logistics and supply-chain services provider that eventually employed 7,000. DeJoy sold the business in 2014 for $615 million.
He has also been a longstanding and loyal contributor of the Republican Party and a longtime supporter of Donald Trump. Lately, President Trump has been doing his best to derail and defund the postal service by claiming that mail-in voting is a corrupt and unreliable means of polling the public. But as the pandemic has created concerns for voting and all other in-public activities, voting by mail and casting absentee ballots has become a more desirable alternative.
Trump’s attempts to discredit mail-in voting is curious given that he and the first lady have both cast their ballots by mail and the president’s current position trailing Democratic challenger Joe Biden in the polls.
Trump’s accusations about voting by mail are baseless and all together false. The mail-in option has been proven a credible and reliable means of casting a vote. Instances of fraud are extremely rare.
Voting by mail dates back more than a century and a half in this country. Soldiers mailed in their ballots from the battlefields during the Civil War.
The president is not hiding his intentions, here. He has admitted that he is intentionally holding up funding for the nation’s postal service to stop all voting by mail because he wants to help his chances for re-election in November.
So, if he can control the mail, can he also try and control an election?
His ploy may not work, now that DeJoy has relented and walked back his initial plans to remove mail processing equipment and upend the country’s mail collection. The embattled postmaster general suddenly reversed his course Tuesday and announced that his original plans will be suspended until after the Nov. 3 election.
This is also a curious decision considering that 20 attorneys general from 20 Democratic states have filed federal lawsuits against the postmaster general and the postal service. They argue that DeJoy has purposely and illegally augmented the postal service’s operations ahead of a coming election, as an increased number of mailed-in ballots are anticipated because more voters are expected to avoid public polling places where they could potential contract the coronavirus.
Meanwhile, DeJoy is scheduled to testify before the Senate on Friday and before the House Oversight Committee next week.
Hearing his testimony and his side of the story should be interesting.
Will Buss teaches broadcasting and journalism at Western Illinois University.
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