SCOTUS fails to deliver postal accountability

The Postal Service is off the hook for misdeeds.

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

Millions of consumers are understandably frustrated with the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) taking forever to deliver their mail and losing $9 billion per year. From settling petty scores with property managers to spying on law-abiding Americans, USPS actions are often chillingly intentional. In a massive blow to rule of law and accountability, the Supreme Court recently held in the USPS v. Konan case that the agency is legally off the hook for misdeeds against Americans. Grounded in a fatally flawed reading of the law, this Court ruling is an affront to accountability and a large leap in the wrong direction.

At stake was whether the USPS can be held accountable for refusing to deliver the mail. Under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), the USPS cannot be hauled into court for “[a]ny claim arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter.”

The original case was brought by Texas landlord Lebene Konan—who is black and rents to white tenants. Konan was allegedly the victim of a years’ long harassment campaign by two local postal employees who weren’t fond of interracial renting. As her legal team noted, “[t]he harassment campaign started when Rojas, the local mail carrier, changed the designated owner of one of Ms. Konan’s properties to one of her white tenants. ... When Ms. Konan complained to the local post office, the USPS Inspector General ‘confirmed that [she] owned the property’ and ordered ‘that mail be delivered.’” But the local postmaster overrode that directive, and things only escalated from there. The local post office marked her mail “undeliverable,” refused to deliver to her, and gave her a hard time when she came in to pick up her mail. This despicable course of conduct not only cost Ms. Konan rental income but also prevented her from accessing critical mail such as medications and doctor’s bills.

Konan reasonably thought she could hold the USPS legally accountable because acts of sabotage by the USPS are more than just “loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission” of mail. However, the government begged to differ, reading these words implausibly broadly to include intentionally holding up the mail. And, according to the Department of Justice, holding postal predators accountable under the FTCA would create a litigation free-for-all in which “any person whose mail is lost or misdelivered could bring a federal tort suit—and potentially proceed to burdensome discovery” on the theory of intentional tampering.

This is a silly argument designed to let the USPS off the hook for anything it does wrong. The reality is there’s a world of difference between (rightly) claiming that the mail is way too slow and alleging a series of intentional and coordinated efforts to sabotage communications. As Konan’s legal team rightly pointed out, only a small proportion of complaints against America’s mail carrier are remotely sinister enough to compare to Konan’s plight and probably wouldn’t be worth the plaintiff’s while to pursue in court.

In its amicus brief filed at the Supreme Court, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) argued that longstanding legal precedent and even old language found in eighty-year-old Post Office Department manuals make the government’s interpretation of FTCA untenable. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court disagreed and bizarrely held that the ordinary meanings of the terms “loss” and “miscarriage” encompass intentional acts. But as TPA noted in its brief, contemporary sources such as Webster’s Second New International Dictionary and The American College Encyclopedia Dictionary support more narrow commonsense definitions.

This decision is a significant setback for postal accountability, and millions of Americans are now at the mercy of a reckless federal agency that is above the law. Lebene Konan and millions of other postal consumers deserve better.