Republicans including Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio) were being their usual selves at a Wednesday House hearing, and Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) sounded sick of their antics. The Wednesday hearing covered the U.S. Postal Service and featured American Postal Workers Union President Mark Dimondstein as a witness alongside Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and others, and the hearing unfolded amid ongoing nationwide concern about slowdowns and other problems at the Postal Service. Jordan characterized concern around the Postal Service as “all a charade,” but as Connolly pointed out, Donald Trump himself was among the chief purveyors of the conspiracy theory that mail-in voting was insecure to the point of providing a means for election fraud!
Rep. Gerry Connolly hits Jim Jordan in the USPS oversight hearing for suggesting that DeJoy's changes weren't partisan:
"It was a federal judge who found it politically motivated. Not a Democratic critic."
"That's not some partisan Democrat. That's a federal judge."
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) February 24, 2021
Addressing the Postal Workers union president, Connolly commented as follows:
‘All the gaslighting that we just heard does not change facts… Am I making this up, as Mr. Jordan apparently would have you believe, that the president of the United States last summer, Donald J. Trump, publicly said voting by mail would lead to massive fraud? Did he say that, or am I imagining that, Mr. Dimondstein?’
If the below is true, Louis DeJoy committed perjury. That’s a crime.
Last August @RepJeffries and I requested the @FBI to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy. No one should be above the law. https://t.co/QHq2LjhU2a
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) February 19, 2021
After Dimondstein replied roughly in the affirmative, confirming Connolly’s account, the Congressman added as follows:
‘The point is, it was Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, who was planting the idea, aided and abetted by disruptive changes proposed by a new Postmaster General and a compliant Board of Governors, that actually eroded public confidence in the ability to vote by mail. That wasn’t a Democratic narrative. That was a Republican narrative by the president of the United States and his enablers… I didn’t vote to overturn an election, and I will not be lectured by people who did about partisanship.’
Watch Connolly below:
The full Connolly/Jordan exchange: pic.twitter.com/umbXmsGgvE
— The Recount (@therecount) February 24, 2021
In his original remarks — which were full of bizarrely belligerent grandstanding — Jordan commented, in part, as follows, in reference to Postal Service concerns:
‘It was all part of the predicate for laying the groundwork for the mail-in balloting and all the chaos and confusion the Democrats wanted, and the laws that I think they passed in so many states frankly in an unconstitutional fashion — it was all about politics. It was all about the election.’
Jordan’s remarks barely even make sense. Why would Democrats intentionally spread chaos surrounding mail-in voting — and then work to expand access to it? Jordan said that they wanted “crazy chaos” around the election — but how would that supposed chaos even help Democrats at all? Is Jordan suggesting that fraudsters used the chaos as a cover for fraud? Others have pushed that idea. If he’s still harboring the idea that fraud is responsible for Biden’s victory, then wow — no court ever even partially accepted the idea, although Trump himself reiterated the nonsense just recently.
Check out Jordan’s comments below:
