Over *5 years*, the USPS—under a POTUS whose party *benefits* from all Americans voting—removed 12,000 mailboxes.
Now, in the *90 days* preelection, a mega-donor to a POTUS who says he wants to *block* mail-in voting is removing boxes.
You know better than this BS, @AndyGrewal.
Now, in the *90 days* preelection, a mega-donor to a POTUS who says he wants to *block* mail-in voting is removing boxes.
You know better than this BS, @AndyGrewal.
Attorneys are *specifically trained* to analogize discrete situations based on their context and their hard data. It is *humiliating* to my profession when a law professor acts like a minimally educated Trumpist willy-nilly comparing two situations that are *entirely* distinct.
One of the bait-and-switches of the Trump era is lawyers like Grewal and Turley—for the sake of clicks—convincing minimally educated Trumpists that lawyers think and argue like everyone else. We don't. We're trained not to. Our tweets shouldn't read like puerile Trump propaganda.
There's *no connection whatsoever* between USPS policy under Obama and under Trump. The timeline is different, the hard data is different, the political context is different, the strategic agenda is different, the oral evidence of intent is different...and @AndyGrewal *knows* it.
MORE/ Here is the USPS, in mid-2016, discussing a policy it initiated *at the beginning of the decade* that *manifestly hurt the Democratic Party* but pursued anyway during the Obama years *without interference from Obama*. See how @AndyGrewal misled here? uspsoig.gov/blog/where-hav…
PS/ The astounding disingenuity of @AndyGrewal has me seeing red. I shouldn't have expend time or energy explaining why he's a liar for, among so much else, failing to mention the concurrent, inexplicable *destruction of multimillion-dollar sorting machines* that's happening now.
PS2/ Never forget: men like Grewal and Turley aren't stupid—and have the same training in legal reasoning I do. They come on Twitter and talk and reason like "regular [Trumpist] folks" to get clicks and followers and far-right media attention. They're a disgrace to my profession.
PS3/ Grewal—a coward—has now responded to this thread by (I kid you not) *fleeing from Twitter for the day* and declaring that the Mueller Report-confirmed fact (and Trump attorney-confirmed fact) that Trump colluded with the Russians via bribery in 2015 is a "conspiracy theory."
PS4/ Americans must never, *ever* forget what people said and did during the national emergency that is the Trump administration. When this is all over, those who spent these years lying to America and aiding and abetting a career criminal should be shunned by professional peers.
PS5/ A reader—who seems to think, I'm not sure why, they're bolstering Grewal's point, rather than the opposite—notes that, per the Washington Post, box-removal began in 2009, not 2011, so what Grewal called a 4-year policy was a 7-year policy that began in a non-election year.
PS6/ The biggest lie in Grewal's post was his first one—claiming what Congress wants to investigate is box removal, not sorting-machine destruction. Any questions on box removal would be asked in the context of Trump's *stated election interference agenda* and DeJoy's other acts.
PS7/ Before he ran off, Grewal pushed a Medium piece that ignores the fact we're in the biggest public health crisis in a century—necessitating a mail-in election. And DeJoy's possibly illegal conflicts of interest—he heavily invested in USPS competitors—are yadda yadda yadda'ed.
PS8/ The bigger issue is a persistent attempt by far-right intellectuals to normalize every event in the Trump presidency by fraudulently analogizing it to something in history it bears only passing resemblance to—and even then, only if we ignore every piece of *context* we have.
PS9/ Surrounding the Grewal thread there's a *mountain* of USPS misinformation. The removed boxes are being replaced? No. They're just being moved? No. Removing sorting machines makes mail delivery faster and more efficient? No. These policies take into account the pandemic? No.
PS10/ What we have is a combination of kernels of truth and whole-but-misleading truths—boxes have been removed for years; the USPS is in financial distress; some policies predated DeJoy—used to obscure actions and agendas Trump publicly declared (and DeJoy's corrupt conflicts).
PS11/ The result is that somehow things publicly known—Trump announced an illegal election interference agenda that relies on slowing the mail; DeJoy has major conflicts, and was involved with the corrupt RNC finance committee—become "conspiracy theories," not simply "the facts."
PS12/ Grewal is so invested in discrediting known facts that he refers to those criticizing Trump's illegal election interference agenda or DeJoy's obvious conflicts of interest and unwillingness to respond to the pandemic as being no better than QAnon—a domestic terror movement.
PS13/ In the reasoning of these far-right charlatans, stating facts is equivalent to domestic terrorism—while weaving a complex fog of bad analogies involving context-removed historical events is just what smart academics are trained to do.
It's an inversion of rational thought.
It's an inversion of rational thought.
PS14/ That said, Grewal *does* know how to use legal reasoning to lie. For instance, DeJoy critics argue that refusing to stop ongoing box removal mid-pandemic—in the face of a mail-in election—is a political act. Grewal pretends the claim is *all box removal* is a political act.
PS15/ One of the more conventional lawyerly tricks is to pretend that your opponent's objection is entirely other than what it is. Another is to identify fringe opinions arguing for the same *result* as your opponent and pretend that it's your opponent who holds those *opinions*.
PS16/ I've never said—or condoned anyone saying—box removal is new or, in itself, election interference. But in the middle of the biggest public health emergency in a century and the necessity of a mail-in vote, continuing a box removal project *becomes* political if not stopped.
PS17/ The evidence that continuing a years-long box removal project is political under the circumstances is enhanced when the man the Postmaster General fundraised for announces he wants to destroy mail-in balloting—and if the PG himself financially benefits from a USPS collapse.
PS18/ What Grewal will never do is tackle the argument that's *actually* being made—that it's a political malfeasance to remove mailboxes, destroy sorting machines, and run the USPS while under conflicts of interest in the middle of *a pandemic that's killed 250,000 in 5 months*.
PS19/ When you read a thread by a far-right charlatan like Grewal, the first thing to do is to ask yourself, "Could this same thread have been written *before* the biggest public health emergency in a century? Does it pretend we're having this conversation in 1984, 1992 or 2006?"
PS20/ Last thought: it's the responsibility of academics to—in a national crisis—not make extra work for their fellow citizens by recklessly indulging fallacies in debating public policy. It enervates America and delays serious discussions about keeping our democracy stable. /end
