Republicans Continue Eroding Our Constitution

The irony is this: Republicans and TEA Partiers make a big deal about following the constitution and make that point by wearing a flag pin on their lapels, and carrying a pocket version of the constitution everywhere they go, pulling it out and showing it to the cameras from time to time.

 

And at the beginning of the previous congress it became a rule in the House that the constitution should be consulted for every piece of legislation that gets introduced. Something that they kind of forgot about in the present session.

The irony is this: Republicans do all of the above and they are the ones chiefly responsible for continued erosion of our constitutional rights and liberties.

Today, let’s look at the Post Office.

The Post Office is a federal government agency expressly required in the US Constitution.

 Section 8 of Article 1:

         The Congress shall have Power To…establish Post Offices and post Roads.

And this is because being able to get mail delivered everywhere was considered to be a necessary function of the government, and right from the beginning.

But now we find that, due to budgeting matters that are beyond their control, the post office must put an end to delivery of mail on Saturdays starting in August.

And that, friends and neighbors, was fully intended by the lame duck session of the Republican-controlled congress in late 2006. Congress jammed a law through in the waning days of 2006 that made doing the business of mail delivery at reasonable rates an impossibility.

Congress made it a law that the Post Office must fully fund a retirement program for its employees to be available for disbursement to retirees who aren’t even born yet – and they gave them only 10 years to do it.

No one, no one in the private sector does business like that. The purpose of the law is and was clear at the time it was passed: it was a naked assault on the Post Office to drive it out of business so that the mail could be delivered by for-profit enterprises, like FedEx and DHL. So that 44 cent stamp to send a letter to Aunt Mildred can be replaced by a 27 dollar fee that one pays FedEx for the same service.

So the Post Office has begun to tighten its belt and Saturday delivery will be no more. Next, we will be hearing about “Tidy Friday” in the Post Office. So the end of the Post Office has begun and no one in the present House seems to want to put a stop to it.

Even though the framers of the constitution seemed to think it was a necessary function of government.