General Discussion

By law, the board may contain not more than five members of a single party, meaning that presidential appointments to the board are usually bipartisan. They're suggested to the president by the Senate majority and minority leaders, then vetted and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.This is important because in the second Obama administration, the Board of Governors was running out of governors as their terms expired. A slate of five appointments was offered by President Obama: Democrats Stephen Crawford, David M. Bennett, and Victoria Reggie Kennedy, and Republicans James Miller III and Mickey Barnett. Kennedy, the widow of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, eventually withdrew her name from consideration.

Miller, who served in the Reagan Administration's budget office, had openly called for privatizing the postal service. Barnett, of New Mexico, was infamous for his lobbying on behalf of the payday loan industry — in particular, opposing a bill that would have capped interest on payday loans at 400 percent. Previously, Sanders had helped stop proposed cuts in the postal service, including the elimination of sorting facilities in White River Junction and Essex Junction. And he opposed privatizing the Postal Service.

With encouragement from numerous public employee labor unions, including the two major unions representing postal service workers, Sanders blocked the appointments of Miller and Barnett.

Sanders was opposed to the nomination of Crawford, who had previously supported reducing post office service to three days a week, but did not block his nomination, Gunnels said.

A ridiculous and useless argument sparked on Twitter over the weekend about whether Bernie Sanders, somehow, is to blame for Trump’s commandeering of the Postal Service, through blocking appointments to the Board of Governors.

This showed a lack of understanding of how the Board of Governors operates. I wrote this back in 2014 about the Board of Governors, a nine-member panel whose terms expire on a staggered basis.

Even if President Obama got a full complement onto the board (and he didn’t, not because of Bernie Sanders holds, but because he didn’t fill the vacancies for many years to begin with, and didn’t prioritize the board when Democrats held the Senate), Trump would have been able to secure a majority by filling expiring seats. I can’t think of a less productive thing to talk about so I’ll end that now.