Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act-- Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise to urge our colleagues to vote for cloture to proceed to the Postal Service bill. I will speak very briefly.

This a great American institution, right there from the founding of our country. In fact, it is in the Constitution to provide post offices. It is an institution that is today in trouble. Last year, it lost almost $10 billion. Why? Part of it is the economic recession, but the real explanation is that mail volume has dropped 21 percent in the last 5 years, and mostly that is because people are using the Internet and e-mail instead of traditional mail. Yet the Postal Service not only itself provides a great service, but it facilitates various sectors of our economy that employ 7 million people--mailers, mail order catalogs, and the like.

Our committee, when confronted with this crisis--and the statement from Postmaster General Donahoe that if nothing was done, he would have to begin curtailing operations sometime this year because he would essentially run out of enough money to operate the Postal Service as it is--tried to get together and work on a balanced program. We reported out a bipartisan bill. Some people said it was too much; some people said it was too little. We think it was just about right.

There has been a lot of dialog with Senator Sanders and others, people on both sides of the aisle. When we take this up--and I sure hope it is ``when'' and not ``if'' because I do not know how we could just turn away from this problem and essentially say to the Postmaster: We are not going to provide you any help; you are going to have to handle this. What he is going to do is close a lot of post offices, in my opinion, close a lot of mail processing facilities, raise prices to the extent he can under existing law.

This is a balanced program. It creates some protections for small and rural post offices before they can be closed. It creates new standards in the delivery of mail so the Postmaster will, in his wisdom, be able to thin out employment at some of the mail processing facilities, perhaps close some of them but nowhere near what he wanted to do earlier.

The Postmaster asked us for authority to go from 6 days of delivery of mail to 5 days of delivery of most mail, and we essentially said: You may have to do that, Mr. Postmaster, but do not do it for 2 years. See if the other things we are authorizing you to do enable you to get the Postal Service back in fiscal balance. But if not, after the 2 years, with the process we ordained, they will have to go to 5 days of delivery.

Here is the bottom line: We are trying everything we can to save this great institution. It is not a relic. It is a fundamental part of the modern economy, and it has some great resources. First is its presence all over the country. One of the things we are doing--we worked on this with Senator Sanders and others--in the substitute, we will create an advisory commission, a new commission which will be charged with the responsibility of not only reviewing the operations of the Postal Service to make sure it is being managed and run most efficiently but for looking for a new business model, for new ways to use the great assets of the Postal Service--one, that it is all over the country in the post offices; and, two, that no one else can cover the last mile of delivery to everybody's house or business in the country regardless of where you live, including the iconic burros that help deliver the mail in the Grand Canyon and the mailmen on snowshoes who deliver it in rural parts of Alaska. Right now, FedEx, UPS, and others use that service of the last mile to complete their delivery to their customers.

We want to see if we can figure out how the Postal Service can make more money so it can stay alive. This is a great American institution which I believe has a great future, but it is not going to have it unless we help.

So here we are challenged again. Are we going to fall into ideological rigidity or partisan conflict and let this great institution slide and fall into a deep crisis or are we going to work together, as I believe our committee has, to present a bipartisan solution which will guarantee, in a very different time in American history, that the post office--the U.S. Postal Service--can play as vital a role as it has throughout all the rest of our history.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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