Senate tries to put wrangling aside to rescue Postal Service from insolvency

 The Senate struggled Thursday to push forward a bill to restructure the U.S. Postal Service, but still lacked accord on which amendments the senators would be allowed to offer.

“We’re really very, very close to getting something done,” said Majority Leader Harry Reid Thursday afternoon. “Our main issue now is whether there will be a 50-vote hurdle or a 60-vote hurdle,” he said.

The Postal Service is headed for financial collapse and perhaps for a taxpayer bailout. Whether Congress can avert this outcome and save it is the question that the Senate has been debating this week as it considers a bipartisan agency restructuring bill.

Reid warned on the Senate floor Thursday, “Those of you who are holding up the bill because you don’t like it, you may not like what the result of having no bill is.”

He also said, “If there is no bill, the post office will be drastically hit.”

Reid and his colleagues face a deadline: the Postal Service has agreed to a moratorium on closing any postal retail facilities until May 15, to allow Congress time to devise a way to resuscitate an enterprise that, if it were in the private sector, would be on the brink of bankruptcy or liquidation

If Congress does not act by that deadline, the postmaster general will close more than 200 mail processing plants and take other cost-cutting steps.
But there’s discord among senators over what “saving” the Postal Service would really mean, whether it’s worth saving, and whether small towns from Maine to Montana will lose the post offices that serve as their community anchors.
“Its failure would deliver a crushing blow to our economy at a time when the economy is already fragile and it would be particularly harmful to people living and working in rural America,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the chief Republican co-sponsor of the restructuring bill.
The legislation’s other chief sponsor, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said, “This bill will keep the Postal Service alive and I think it will keep it well and put it on the path to surviving forever – but in a different way …”
Noting that the Postal Service still delivers 563 million pieces of mail each day, Lieberman said it was “unthinkable” that it could cease operation, calling it “not just a relic of the 18^th century but a pivotal part of the 21^st century.”