Did Bernie Sanders block President Obama's appoints to the USPS Board?

[lapucelle]

6. Yes, in December 2016.

As President Barack Obama's second term came to a close, a dispute erupted between two of the Senate's most polarizing figures.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., squared off over Obama's nominees to the U.S. Postal Service's Board of Governors -- the powerful panel that oversees post office operations. When the two politicians failed to reach an agreement, all nine seats were left unfilled, laying the foundation for a controversy that now engulfs one of America's most beloved institutions and, some are alleging, could threaten the 2020 election.

Sanders' decision in 2015 and 2016 to block two of the Obama administration's nominees -- made at the behest of powerful union leaders -- and McConnell's decision to block the rest in retaliation created a unique opportunity for President Donald Trump to appoint a full slate of picks to a panel that is meant to be comprised of bipartisan members serving staggered, seven-year terms.

That standoff over the appointees has emerged as a poignant example of the law of unintended consequences in Washington -- and Postal Service insiders now place it at the root of the current threat facing both the Postal Service and the upcoming presidential election.

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Late in the Obama administration, only one governor remained on the board as a backlog of five nominees accumulated in the Senate. All five had sailed through Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the committee of jurisdiction, but were left in limbo without a vote before the full chamber, according to several people involved in the discussion.

At issue, those people said, were two Republican nominees: James Miller III, a former governor who had been renominated to the board in 2013, and Mickey Barnett, another former governor who had lobbied for payday lenders in his home state of New Mexico.

Miller had served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, and had at one point suggested privatizing the Postal Service -- a position that made him anathema to the powerful postal unions.

To quell Miller's nomination, Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, encouraged Sanders to block a vote on his nomination.

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The slate of nominees included former Sen. Ted Kennedy's widow, Vicki Kennedy, and Stephen Crawford, an economic sociologist who served on Obama's postal service transition team in 2009. Crawford said the group of five often met over lunch to discuss their mutual frustration at the holdup.

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The Postal Service had spent years in dire financial straits by the time Trump took office in January 2017. One month earlier, the final governor remaining on the board had seen his term expire and stepped down, leaving two Obama-era holdovers as postmaster general and deputy postmaster general to lead the agency until DeJoy's appointment earlier this year.

For the first time since President Richard Nixon established the Board of Governors, it was empty. Industry experts said this absence of leadership led to a period of paralysis at the agency, where the status quo -- which almost everyone agreed was not sustainable -- prevailed indefinitely.

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In early 2018, the president tapped Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to convene a task force to "evaluate the operations and finances of the USPS and to develop recommendations for administrative and legislative reforms that will enable the USPS to create a sustainable business model," the White House said.

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"Because this administration inherited a completely empty slate, for the first time ever we have all new governors," Plunkett said. "[It is] technically a bipartisan group -- but they all were appointed by the same president."

https://abcnews.go.com/US/years-turmoil-postal-service-governing-board-fueled-political/story?id=72482926