Trump's Fight Against Mail-In Voting

By Yuval Rosenberg

Trump Admits He Wants to Block USPS
Funding to Stop Mail-In Votes

President Trump indicated Thursday morning that he opposes
Democratic proposals to provide additional funding to the U.S.
Postal Service because he doesn’t want to expand voting by mail
ahead of November’s presidential election.

Trump has repeatedly railed against mail-in voting,
claiming without evidence that it results in widespread fraud and
could result in a "rigged" election. He told the Fox Business
Network’s Maria Bartiromo Thursday morning that the postal service
funding is one reason his administration and congressional
Democrats remain far apart on a broader coronavirus relief package,
inaccurately suggesting that Democrats want universal mail-in
voting.

"They want $3.5 billion for something that will turn out
to be fraudulent, that's election money basically. They want 3.5
trillion dollars for the mail-in votes, OK, universal mail-in
ballots, 3.5 trillion. They want $25 billion — billion — for the
post office. 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."

He added: "Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they
don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in
voting, they just can’t have it."

In an afternoon press briefing, the president denied that
he had threatened to veto a deal that included funding to help the
Postal Service handle an expected surge in mail-in voting — while
repeating his claim that mail-in voting will make the election
"fraudulent."

The background: The Democratic
coronavirus relief package passed by the House in May included $3.6
billion for "election resilience grants" that
Politico reports could be used for a range of
measures, including preparing for what’s expected to be an
unprecedented number of mail-in ballots but also for protecting
in-person voting and supplying personal protective equipment for
poll workers.

The package also included $25 billion for the Postal
Service. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Thursday that
the figure was the amount recommended by the Postal Service’s
bipartisan board of governors, "100% appointed by Donald
Trump."

Experts say that mail-in voting fraud has been
rare and that there’s
no evidence that mail-in voting favors Democrats, but at
a White House briefing Wednesday, Trump argued — again, baselessly
— that expanded mail-in voting in this year’s election would result
in "the greatest fraud in the history of elections." In March,
Trump
said that making it easier for more people to vote
would ensure "you’d never have a Republican elected in this country
again."


Politico notes that a
Monmouth poll released Tuesday found 72% of
Democrats are very or somewhat likely to vote by mail, compared to
22% of Republicans.

Trump again says the quiet part out loud:
Trump is making an explicitly political case for his
opposition to Postal Service funding. As Politico puts it:
"he doesn’t want to add funding for the Postal Service
in an attempt to kneecap mail-in voting, which he believes will be
heavily Democratic."

Trump’s not the only administration figure to make that
link. In an
interview with CNBC Thursday, White House economic
adviser Larry Kudlow lumped "voting rights" in as part of what he
described as a liberal wish list of demands for coronavirus relief.
"So [many] of the Democratic asks are really liberal, left
wishlists — voting rights and aid to aliens and so forth," he said.
"That's not our game, and the president can't accept that kind of
deal," Kudlow continued.

This could further complicate covid relief
talks: In sum, Trump’s comments on Thursday
leave some confusion about just what he would or would not accept
in a coronavirus relief deal.

USPS funding is actually one area where the two sides had made
progress, with Democrats reportedly agreeing to $10 billion for one
year instead of $25 billion through fiscal 2022.

"What [negotiators] are saying is different than what the
president is saying," Pelosi said. "If they came in the room and
said the president is never doing this, that's something we'd take
to the American people. And the American people want the Postal
Service protected and preserved."

Biden campaign responds: "The
president of the United States is sabotaging a basic service that
hundreds of millions of people rely upon, cutting a critical
lifeline for rural economies and for delivery of medicines, because
he wants to deprive Americans of their fundamental right to vote
safely during the most catastrophic public health crisis in over
100 years," a Biden campaign spokesperson said in a statement.
Asked what he thought about Trump tying his opposition to Postal
Service funding to mail-in voting, Biden said it was "Pure Trump.
He doesn’t want an election."

Election watchdogs slam Trump: "Trump's
brazen abuse of the post office to try and win an election is a
shameful misuse of presidential power. Defunding the Postal Service
and slowing its ability to deliver mail ballots to Americans will
hurt Democratic and Republican voters alike," Trevor Potter, the
president of the Campaign Legal Center and former Republican chair
of the Federal Election Commission, told
NPR.

Jana Morgan, director of the Declaration for
American Democracy, a coalition of more than 160 organizations,
said in a
statement: "President Trump made clear today that
he is intentionally sabotaging the U.S. Post Office and blocking
election funding to suppress Americans' votes. This act is a
disgrace and a stain on our democracy."

Read more
here,
here or
here.

Coronavirus Relief? See You in September

In another sign that any additional coronavirus relief
package is likely weeks away, the Senate left Washington, D.C.
Thursday until September.


The Hill’s Jordain Carney:

"Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had kept
the chamber in session this week, which was technically the first
in its August recess, as a last-ditch attempt to create space for
the administration and congressional Democrats to get an
agreement.
"But with talks stalemated, senators argue there is
little reason for them to keep holding daily, roughly 1 1/2-hour
sessions. The House already left town and isn't expected to return
until Sept. 14."

Pelosi told reporters Thursday that talks on a deal would
resume when Republicans are ready to talk about a package costing
at least $2 trillion. "When they're ready to do that, we'll sit
down," she
said.

Quote of the Day: CDC Director Says US Was Under-Prepared for
Pandemic

"We need to over-invest, get over-prepared. I
will say that in four or five decades of investment, when the big
one came — and this is not a minor one, this is the greatest public
health crisis that hit this nation in a century — that we were
under-prepared. And we need to owe it to our children and
grandchildren that this nation is never under-prepared again for a
public health crisis."

– CDC Director Robert Redfield, in an interview with

WebMD, saying that the U.S. was now paying the
price for its failure to invest in public health.

New Jobless Claims Drop Below 1 Million

The number of new unemployment claims fell below 1 million
for this first time since March, the Labor Department
announced Thursday.

About 963,000 Americans filed for state unemployment
benefits for the week ending August 8, a drop of more than 200,000
from the week before. Another 488,000 people filed for benefits
through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program created to
assist self-employed workers, down 167,000 from the previous
week.

The number of people receiving some form of unemployment
benefits fell by 3.1 million from the week before, but the number
is still at a historically high level of 28.2 million. The weekly
data bring the total number of unemployment filings since the
pandemic took hold to more than 55 million.

"Another larger-than-expected decline in jobless claims
suggests that the jobs recovery is regaining some momentum but with
a staggering 28 million workers still claiming some form of jobless
benefits, much labor market progress remains to be done," Lydia
Boussour and Gregory Daco of Oxford Economics said in a note to
clients.

Reduced pressure for another relief package?
The larger than expected drop in jobless claims won’t make it
any easier for negotiators to agree on a new coronavirus relief
package. Republicans will likely see the data as support for their
claims that the $600 per week in extra unemployment benefits
millions of workers were receiving through the end of July was
acting as a brake on the recovery, and that the economy is now in
the middle of a rapid, V-shaped recovery. "The numbers are coming
in very, very nicely," Kudlow
said earlier this week, adding that he didn’t
think the lack of a new relief bill would harm the
economy.

Many economists have their doubts about the V-shaped
recovery, though, given the size of the current economic hole and
the inability of the U.S. to control the pandemic. "The reality is
that millions of people have lost their jobs," AnnElizabeth Konkel
of the Indeed Hiring Lab
told CNN. "These people are faced with mounting
bills, and are struggling to find work. The expiration of the
expanded $600 federal unemployment benefit has only compounded the
dire situation they face. Meanwhile the source of all this economic
hardship, the coronavirus, remains unchecked."

CNBC’s Steve Liesman summarized the skeptics’ view in a

tweet: "If jobless claims running just under a million
in the fifth month of the recession is your benchmark for an
economy being in good shape, may i suggest you’ve set the bar too
low? That’s still 4x the pre-recession level and about 300k above
the worst level of ‘08."

Is Trump’s Unemployment Benefit Plan Legal?

The White House scrambled earlier this week to clarify
Trump’s effort to provide extra weekly payments to unemployed
workers, settling on the idea that the new program would provide
workers with up to $300 per week in enhanced payments, without
requiring states to contribute.

But The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell
says the plan is anything but clear, with the
administration providing "at least five contradictory versions of
this parallel benefit system" announced by the
president.

Citing Georgetown law professor David Super, Rampell adds
that in addition to being a moving target, the program as currently
described is probably illegal. Trump’s original plan required
states to contribute 25% of the cost of the new unemployment
benefit, or $100, bringing the total to $400 per week — a number
that has been cited by numerous White House officials. But
following a wave of complaints from cash-strapped states, the White
House says it has changed the rules to eliminate that
contribution.

The problem, Rampell says, is that the 25% cost-sharing
payment was part of the plan for a reason. The "state funding match
included in Trump’s executive action wasn’t there just for kicks,"
Rampell writes. "It was there because it’s required under the law
Trump cited as giving him authority to create this benefit program:
the Stafford Act."

That’s not the only legal issue: "Counting existing state
spending on jobless benefits, rather than new spending, to meet the
state-match requirement would also violate Office of Management and
Budget Circular A-87," Rampell says.

Why it matters: Aside from the basic
but profound issue of public officials following the law, the
suspect legal standing of Trump’s plan could prevent states from
participating in the program. "It’s not a matter of whether states
are willing to sign on the dotted line," Super told Rampell. "It’s:
What are you actually asking me to sign up for?"

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