Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2011 -- Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Ms. COLLINS. Madam President, at a later time I am going to speak in strong opposition to the substitute offered by the Senator from Arizona, but I must say that he has every right to offer that substitute. We should fully debate it, and then we should vote on it. I am puzzled by the procedural steps that have been taken this afternoon to curtail the debate and amendment process on this bill without our even trying to get an agreement on the number of amendments, perhaps limiting them to relevant amendments, which I think would have been a fair way to proceed. So as much as I am opposed to the substance of Senator McCain's substitute and believe it is ill-advised, I do believe we should have a full debate on it and a vote on it. That is what we are here for.

There are many different views on how we should save the Postal Service, but surely all of us ought to recognize that we simply cannot allow the Postal Service to fail. It is the linchpin of a trillion dollar mailing industry that employs 8.7 million Americans. It is absolutely vital. It also is an American institution with roots going to our Constitution, and we worked very hard in a bipartisan way on our Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to come up with a very good bill that would put the Postal Service back on the right track.

It would allow it to compassionately downsize its workforce, which it needs to do. As painful as that is, we would do it in a compassionate way by giving authority for buyouts and retirement incentives similar to those used by the private sector. The Postmaster General has said he believes he could reduce the number of employees by 100,000 without layoffs but by giving these incentives, particularly since more than 33 percent of the Postal Service employees are already eligible for retirement.

Senator McCain has a different view on how we should go about that. He has a different view on Saturday delivery, on rural post offices, on overnight delivery of mail, all of which I think are important. Our bill does not prevent the closure of every single post office, nor does it dictate that a certain number remain open or closed, for that matter. What we did is we set standards. That is the way it should be. We have the Postal Regulatory Commission set standards for access to postal services, and those standards are supposed to include consideration of such factors as distance to the next post office, geography, public transportation, and weather factors. That is far better than a one-size-fits-all approach that the Senator from Arizona would have or the approach used by the Postmaster General to target 3,200 post offices without even looking at whether there are alternative and far less expensive ways to deliver the services. And there are.

For example, a rural post office could be colocated in a pharmacy or a grocery store. It could still exist but run different hours, perhaps be opened from 7 to 9 in the morning and 5 to 7 at night. I wager that a lot of my constituents would appreciate that. That would be on their way to work in the morning and on their way home at night. It could colocate with a State office or local office, move into a townhall, or have a Federal agency move in with the post office. It could offer services that are available generally at State and local offices. There are so many creative ways we can preserve postal services in rural areas and yet reduce costs, and I believe the Postal Service needs to be far more creative in its approach.

But I do not support the approach Senator McCain has laid out. One of his proposals would create a new bureaucracy--I thought we were against creating new bureaucracies around here--such as a new control board that would be over the board of governors and would have these dictatorial powers over the Postal Service. That is a proposal that I don't think makes sense.

Our approach is to have a commission that would examine the governance of the Postal Service, but perhaps what we should do, if there is something wrong with the structure of the board of governors--it was substantially revised in 2006--is then we should revamp the board of governors, not create this new superbureaucracy on top of it.

I agree with the comments of the Senator from Massachusetts on Saturday delivery. The provision that Senator McCain has to move directly to 5-day delivery and his negative comments on the fact that we would prohibit that from happening for 2 years misunderstands the intent of our bill. It is not to say that might never happen; it is to say that reducing service should be the last resort, not the first option. The Postal Service has an advantage that it delivers 6 days a week.

Now if, in fact, after all the costs and waste and excess have been wrung out of the system and the Postal Service is still not solvent after 2 years, then we may have to move to 5-day delivery. But to give up that advantage immediately, I can tell you what is going to happen: The volume of mail will decline further. And if the volume of mail declines further after having a 26-percent decline over the past 5 years, what is going to happen? Revenues will plummet once again. So we need to be very careful about cutting service because it leads to mailers leaving the system. And once the big mailers, in particular, leave the Postal Service, they are not coming back, and the Postal Service will sink further and further into a death spiral.

My approach is to try to keep and grow the customers for the Postal Service. I think moving to Saturday delivery would drive more mail away and would hurt service and thus decrease the volume. So I do not think that is a good approach. But the reason for our 2-year delay is not an endless study, as has been described by the Senator from Arizona. It is to allow time for the retirement incentives to go into effect, the downsizing of the workforce to go into effect, the workers comp reforms to go into effect, the new arbitration provisions to go into effect, the administrative efficiencies that we mandate to go into effect--countless provisions of the bill to go into effect. I believe if they are aggressively and well implemented by the Postal Service leaders--if they are--there will be no need to eliminate Saturday delivery. That is the reason for the provision in our bill. But we recognize that maybe that will not happen. Maybe the provisions will not be aggressively and well implemented, and the Postal Service will find that it needs to take that extra step. But, surely, our first approach ought to be to implement cuts without hurting service.

Let me give an example of that from my own State. In Hampden, ME, it is one of the two postal processing centers for the entire State of Maine. The other one is in Scarborough, ME, in southern Maine. The Hampden facility is absolutely essential for processing mail from the broad reaches of northern Maine, eastern Maine, and parts of western Maine.

Under the Postal Service's proposal, the Hampden facility would be closed. That virtually eliminates the possibility of overnight delivery for roughly two-thirds of the State of Maine by geography. It means a letter mailed from my hometown of Caribou, in northern Maine, to Presque Isle, just 10 or 11 miles away, would have to make a 600-mile roundtrip to Scarborough, ME, in order to be processed and delivered. I can't imagine how many days that is going to take, particularly in the winter, and this is all ground transportation.

So that is the kind of ill-conceived decision our bill is intended to prevent because it is the kind of decision that is going to cause postal customers to take their business elsewhere. In proof of that, I received an e-mail from a small business owner in Bangor, ME, which is the town right next to Hampden, who told me he had already received a notice from his payroll company saying if the Hampden facility closes, then they recommend that he move to electronic payroll or they will hand deliver the checks from their payroll. So that, again, is lost business for the Postal Service.

Could things be done at the Hampden facility to save money? Absolutely. If the facility's size is too big compared to the volume of mail it is now processing, reduce the footprint. Rent out part of the facility. A major mailer would love to be right in the same building as the postal processing center. It could easily be reconfigured to accomplish that. So the Postal Service can do a lot to reduce its costs without doing away with overnight delivery, with Saturday delivery, and with the treatment of first-class mail in the way that we have been accustomed.

Coming from New Hampshire, I know the Presiding Officer has a special appreciation for this: The steps that will be taken if we do not act will leave rural America behind. Not every part of my State has access to broadband. We talk all the time about how people can go on the Internet. Well, they can't in parts of my State. We are making progress in that area, but there are many rural areas in Maine that do not have access to broadband. So they do not have alternatives.

Weekly and daily newspapers would be at a terrible disadvantage if overnight delivery is no longer available for two-thirds of the State of Maine. Think about that. Think what it means for bill paying for those small businesses sending out bills to their customers.

Think about what it means to elderly individuals who are receiving prescription drugs through the mail--very common in my State, which is one of the States with the oldest population in the Nation. A lot of our elderly in Maine are, particularly in the winter months, essentially homebound and they rely on getting those pharmaceuticals through the mail. So if we do away with Saturday delivery, close the processing plants, no more overnight delivery, Monday holidays as well--I have talked to the Postmaster General, and he has conceded to me that even a first-class package or letter mailed on a Thursday would not arrive until a Tuesday. That is a long time when a person is waiting for vital medication.

So our approach, our fundamental premise, is to recognize that the Postal Service must become leaner, more streamlined, more efficient. It must downsize to respond to declining volume, but it must be smart in how it does so. It must do so in a way that does not alienate more of its customers because if it loses more of its customers, volume will decline and revenues will decline. It is that simple, and that is why this bill has been so carefully crafted.

This is not the bill I alone would have proposed, and I think that is true of all four of the sponsors of this bill. But we did what we are supposed to do in the Senate. We worked together. We had countless meetings, at times--I think the Senator from Connecticut will agree--endless meetings, to hammer out these provisions, to strike compromises.

We consulted widely with our colleagues--with GAO, with the Postal Service, with large mailers and small mailers, with the greeting card industry, with the newspaper industry, with magazine publishers, with anyone who had a stake--with the postal unions--and we got their suggestions and we crafted the bill to the best of our ability. We worked hard on it. I think it is a good bill.

I am very disappointed and indeed puzzled why we can't now proceed with debate on amendments on this bill and why we have a cloture motion on this bill already filed. That makes no sense to me. We are acting in good faith. We are open for business right now. We could be taking up amendments right now. I hope the leader will reconsider and allow us to do this bill in the usual way. I would pledge to him--and he knows I am sincere in this--to work with him to try to come up with amendments and see if we can go back and forth, side to side, and start working through them. We are here. We are open for business. We are ready to go.

This bill matters. Our economy is still very fragile. If the Postal Service stops delivering mail this fall, it will be a crushing blow to this economy. If it stops delivering mail in certain areas or the mail is very slow, it will also hurt this economy.

We cannot leave rural America behind. The mandate of the Postal Service is universal service. That means whether a person lives in the far reaches of Alaska or at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in Arizona or on an island off the coast of Maine; all are supposed to be able to have access to the Postal Service. It is one of the things that unites us as a country.

So I urge my colleagues to come together in good faith and work through what I believe is a very important bill with a vital mission; that is, to save the U.S. Postal Service.

Thank you, Madam President.

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