Obama Hammers Nail in Coffin of Post Office

On Friday the White House announced that President Obama was appointing Tony Hammond as the fifth commissioner on the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC). No offense to Mr. Hammond, but that’s probably not good news for communities trying to save their post office or processing plant, and it’s not good news for postal workers either.

The PRC is supposed to have five commissioners, but for months now, there have been only four, and we’ve been waiting to hear who the fifth would be. According to US Code, "Not more than three of the Commissioners may be adherents of the same political party." Currently there are two Democrats — Ruth Goldway and Nanci Langley — and two Republicans — Mark Acton and Robert Taub. Obama could have appointed a Democrat, but instead he chose Hammond, a Republican. If confirmed by the Senate, Hammond will give the PRC a Republican majority until 2016.

It’s not that Hammond is ill equipped to be a Commissioner. He was on the PRC from 2002 to 2010, and he served twice as its Vice-Chairman. He obviously knows the ropes.

Still, with all those years on the PRC, you wouldn’t say Hammond brings a fresh perspective to the Commission, and he is definitely hard-core Republican. For much of his career, he was a Republican political operative. From 1989 to 1994, he was the director of the Missouri Republican Party, and in 1998 he was Director of Campaign Operations for the Republican National Committee. Hammond was involved with postal matters during the ten years he served on Capitol Hill on the staff of Southwest Missouri Congressman Gene Taylor, the Ranking Member of the Post Office and Civil Service Committee.

Hammond also learned about the Postal Service when he worked as the VP of a direct marketing business. That experience has probably given him a particularly sympathetic understanding of issues facing direct marketers, who play a big role in influencing postal policies, rates, and so on.

Politics shouldn’t matter in PRC decisions, but they do. Since Commissioners perform in a manner similar to judges, they are supposed to make rational decisions based solely on the evidence, independently of their politics. But as we’ve seen with the Supreme Court, justices are human and inevitably influenced by their political persuasion.

Nothing’s more political than postal business. Efforts to downsize the Postal Service are greeted with applause by anti-government, anti-union Republicans, while Democrats have shown more interest in protecting postal jobs. Since Republicans don’t like government regulation of business, they’re less inclined to favor a strong role for the PRC than Democrats might be.

But the Postal Service is not a private business, and postal politics often make strange bedfellows. In the case of the exigent rate increase, for example, the mail industry actually found itself — at least for a moment — siding with the PRC when it turned down the Postal Service’s request for a rate hike last year.

Preserving post offices is another unique case. Elected representatives on both sides of the aisle have been hearing it from their constituents about post office closings. That’s why proposed legislation coming out of a bipartisan committee in the Senate has an amendment that would make it harder to close rural post offices.

The consolidation of processing plants is yet another case where geography often matters more than politics. Many Republicans, who generally favor cost-cutting measures like closing plants, have been fighting to save the plants in their districts.

Generally speaking, though, Republicans are pushing harder than Democrats to make the Postal Service act “like a business” rather than a public service. The bill that comes out of the Republican-dominated House will give the Postal Service much more power to close post offices and slash jobs than the Senate version. It’s Republicans who want to see the the union workforce drastically reduced in size and power, and there aren't many Democrats talking about privatizing the Postal Service.

With a Republican-dominated PRC, it’s hard to imagine many appeals on post office closures winning a “remand” decision. It’s been hard enough getting a victory with two Democrats and two Republicans. Of the last twenty decisions, just two were remanded, and only Chairman Goldway has issued dissents from decisions to affirm the closing.

You can get an idea of how Hammond feels about remanding decisions by looking at the dissenting opinion he co-authored on the case of the post office in Rentiesvile, Oklahoma. That office was closed for an emergency suspension in 2004, six years after the discontinuance process had been initiated. In 2010, the Postal Service moved to formally close the post office based on data and public comments that were by that time twelve years old. For that reason, the PRC remanded the decision for further consideration.

In his dissent Hammond wrote, “Remanding this determination requires the Postal Service to engage in a process which will most likely yield the same result as the one it came to in this current case.” As unusual as the Rentiesville case was, that kind of thinking could be applied to any closing decision the Postal Service makes, and it doesn’t bode well for future appeals.

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