Mark Meadows Lied About The Post Office, And Jake Tapper Was Not Having It

It's your Sunday show Rundown!

Donald Trump has done everything he can to grind the gears of the United States Postal Service. But as we have gotten closer to November, Trump and his goons have become more brazen in their desperation to cling to power. So much so, the rest of the media have let go of the latest shiny distraction long enough to help protect a CONSTITUTIONAL pillar of our democracy.

Let's focus on White House chief of staff and friend to at least ONE person of color , Mark Meadows. Appearing on CNN's "State Of The Union," Jake Tapper briefly recapped the situation and asked the most obvious rhetorical question:

Mark Meadows pressed on Trump's false claims of mail-in voter fraud    www.youtube.com 

TAPPER: Why is President Trump trying to prevent Americans from exercising their right to vote, if they choose to vote this way, especially during a pandemic?

MEADOWS: Well, the president doesn't have a problem with anybody voting by mail, if you would look at it in terms of maybe a no-excuse absentee ballot. What he opposes is universal mail-in ballots, where you send millions of ballots out to registered voters across the country, even those that don't request it.

The Trump administration has been trying to create some huge difference between universal mail-in ballots and absentee ballot/vote by mail. After demonizing mail-in ballots some more, Meadows said something so stupid that it might give you an aneurysm:

MEADOWS: That's a disaster, where we won't know the election results on November 3, and we might not know it for months. And, for me, that's problematic, because the Constitution says that then a Nancy Pelosi and the House would actually pick the president on January 20.

Oh, THAT'S the disaster? Not disenfranchising voters or screwing veterans or the elderly out of their prescriptions or destroying a vital part of small business logistics. The "real" disaster is Meadow's whiny boss won't get the instant dopamine hit from getting results on election night. I mean, forget the reason we vote on a Tuesday in November is specifically to account how long farmers needed to travel to vote.

Or we can discount that the inauguration of a new president used to be on March 4th after an election from 1789 to 1933, until it was shortened due to the long lame-duck session delaying FDR's "New Deal" by 4 months. Eleven weeks is really not that long, and simultaneously enough time to counts every vote! Meadows'sfearmongeringbelief that Pelosi would pick the president also shows you can be a (former) congressman, and also know jackshit about the Constitution. (Or maybe he's just lying.)

Tapper explained that only nine states have universal mail-in ballots, four of which have a Republican top election official. Meadows "countered" by trying to blame Democrats for why the USPS and the American people aren't funded.

MEADOWS: But, listen, if my Democrat friends are all upset about this, come back to Washington, D.C., where the president and [are] right now. Why don't they come back? Let's go ahead and get a stimulus check out to Americans. Let's make sure that small businesses are protected with an extended PPP program and put the postal funding in there. We will pass it tomorrow. The president will sign it. And this will all go away, because what we're seeing is, Democrats are trying to use this to their political advantage, Jake.

The gall of Mark Meadows!

First, the House of Representatives has passed and Democratic senators said they would vote for the Heroes Act in May which does many things:

• provides additional direct payments of up to $1,200 per individual;

• modifies and expands the Paycheck Protection Program

• establishes a fund to award grants for employers to provide pandemic premium pay for essential workers;

• provides funding and establishes requirements for COVID-19 testing and contact tracing;

• eliminates cost-sharing for COVID-19 treatments;

• extends and expands the moratorium on certain evictions and foreclosures; and

• requires employers to develop and implement infectious disease exposure control plans.

• Provides emergency supplemental appropriations, expansion and modification to federal agencies like VA and Postal Service

Second, the negotiations were stalled and blocked by Republicans, only for Trump to then sign four Executive Suggestions that have neither the teeth to be enforced nor the constitutional standing to be upheld. Hence why Meadows is trying to insinuate Dems need to comeback to work on stuff they've already passed. 

Tapper brought up all the sabotage they've been doing with removing sorting machines and mailboxes , but Meadows called that a lie and dared Tapper's producers to "prove it." Tapper did indeed drop that fact-check:

TAPPER: In terms of the fact-check that you asked me to look into...one of my great producers did in terms of the machines. Chris Bentley, president of the National Postal Mail Handlers Union Local 297, which covers Kansas and part of Missouri , two good Trump states, told CNN that postal management has already taken out four machines in Kansas City, two machines in Springfield, Missouri, and one machine in Wichita, Kansas. That is earlier this year, under this new postmaster general.

Meadows said more BS, made claims about (nonexistent) voter fraud, and tried to blame Obama. That didn't work that well either, but it was a good pull quote if you ant to sum up GOP governance and right-wing politics in general:

TAPPER: There's no evidence of widespread voter fraud, though. But there's no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

MEADOWS: There's no -- there's no -- there's no evidence that there's not either. That's the definition of fraud. Jake.

This is "Schrödinger's Conservative." This is how they push every debunked conspiracy and failed right wing theory. It's how QAnon grows, because there's no evidence there's not a Q.

It's the GOP motto: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night will ever stop conservative bullshit outright."

Have a week!

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