From Bloomberg via email

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Carper said he plans to delay until January his panel’s markup of legislation that’s intended to shore up the financially ailing U.S. Postal Service.

It would be the third time he has rescheduled action on the bill, S. 1486, which includes a compromise on ending Saturday mail service.

A markup that had been scheduled for yesterday was postponed after Carper and the committee’s ranking Republican, Tom Coburn, a cosponsor of the bill, weren’t able to finalize language on a manager’s amendment. The legislation had previously been on the panel’s business meeting agenda on Nov. 6 and Nov. 20.

“I like to schedule markups as an effort to try to force people to make decisions, compromises, and to get us to the altar,” Carper said today at a Bloomberg Government breakfast.Carper said his staff realized on Monday that the manager’s amendment wasn’t ready.

Instead of a markup on Wednesday, he said the panel had a “come-to-Jesus-type of meeting” on Tuesday with labor unions, mailers, printers and other stakeholders to discuss proposed changes to the underlying bill, including allowing the Postal Service to end Saturday mail delivery if mail volume or revenue dropped below a certain level.
Staff for Carper and Coburn were continuing to talk to other panel members about their concerns with the legislation, Coburn said yesterday in an interview on Capitol Hill.

Even so, Coburn has a different strategy from Carper when it comes to planning markups.

“We shouldn’t keep scheduling markups when we don’t have language ready,” Coburn said. “It’s very frustrating for the members.”

For more on the debate over the compromise on ending Saturday service, see the report by Bloomberg’s Angela Greiling Keane.

To contact the reporter on this story: Caitlin Webber in Washington at cwebber4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Katherine Rizzo at krizzo5@bloomberg.net