this year, as I do every year, I have met with many Vermonters who have come up to me to express their views about the future of the U.S. Postal Service. But this year, these meetings have taken a different tone. Today, rather than asking me how the Senate can make a durable and effective institution even stronger, Vermonters ask me how the Senate can stave off the impending default of the Postal Service. I hear these questions from businesses, from private citizens, and from postal employees. I am stopped by Vermonters in the grocery store or at the gas pump, wanting to know what we in the Senate will do. Vermont, because of our mostly rural population, is more dependent on the Postal Service than are urban and densely populated States. Vermonters, almost to a person, subscribe to Ben Franklin's vision of a public Postal Service that guarantees the delivery of mail to everyone. These questions about the coming collapse of the Postal Service are strange to say the least. The USPS posted a $100 million profit from its business operations during the first quarter of fiscal year 2013. So how is it that a company that made $100 million in the first quarter of this fiscal year is in financial trouble? As in far too many other instances, the problem is not with the Postal Service, the problem is with the United States House of Representatives. In 2006, by unanimous consent, the Senate took up and passed the House's Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act.…
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