Government affairs
Legislative Updates
Today, a bipartisan majority of support was reached for House Resolution 33 (H. Res. 33), which expresses the sense of the House of Representatives that Congress should take all appropriate measures to ensure that the United States Postal Service (USPS) remains an independent establishment of the Federal Government and is not subject to privatization.
Introduced by Reps. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) and Rodney Davis (R-IL) on January 9, the resolution hit 219 cosponsors (188 Democrat, 31 Republican), officially crossing the minimum threshold of 218 to reach a majority in the House. For reference, this same resolution hit 239 cosponsors (183 Democrat, 56 Republican) in the 115th Congress.
Thanks to the hard work of letter carriers across the country, this is the first of our priority resolutions to reach a majority. This is a critically important goal for upcoming postal reform talks in light of the White House Postal Task Force report and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Government Reorganization Plan, both of which praise or directly call for efforts to privatize USPS, among other unacceptable proposals.
There is a lot more work to be done in the 116th Congress, however. The Senate anti-privatization resolution, Senate Resolution 99 (S. Res. 99), has 33 cosponsors (24 Democrat, 7 Republican, 2 Independent) as of press. In order to reach a majority of support in the Senate, we need to push that number to over 51 cosponsors. For reference, this same resolution hit 51 cosponsors (44 Democrat, 5 Republican, 2 Independent) in the 115th Congress.
As letter carriers know, we also have three other priority resolutions that need more cosponsors, H. Res. 23 on door delivery, H. Res. 54 on six-day delivery, and H. Res. 60 on service standards.
NALC encourages all letter carriers to pull up the newly designed fact sheets to help you educate your members of Congress on our issues. These may be found on the NALC Government Affairs page under Legislative Activities, and then Fact Sheets.
In the effort to reach a bipartisan majority on all resolutions, NALC encourages all letter carriers to check if your Representative is already a cosponsor on H. Res. 23, H. Res. 33, H. Res. 54, or H. Res. 60, and if your Senators are cosponsors of S. Res. 99 before reaching out and asking them for their support.
