Joe Lieberman: “I rise to urge our colleagues to vote for cloture to proceed to the Postal Service bill. I will speak very briefly. This…”

“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.…”