“We have a situation now where Wall Street banks are not only too big to fail, they are too big to jail,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said on Wednesday when he announced that he will introduce legislation to break up the country’s biggest banks. He was responding to Attorney General Eric Holder’s assertion that prosecuting big banks would disrupt the economy. Sanders on Tuesday called on the postmaster general to withdraw his plan to stop Saturday mail delivery. He cited a Government Accountability Office legal ruling that the Postal Service has no authority to end Saturday mail without the approval of Congress. In his weekly radio and Internet town meeting, Sanders on Friday took calls from people across America. Listen to a clip from the program here. 

Too Big To Jail?

Sanders said this week that he will introduce legislation to break up banks that have grown so big that the Justice Department has not pursued prosecutions for fear an indictment would harm the financial system. “In my view, no single financial institution should be so large that its failure would cause catastrophic risk to millions of American jobs or to our nation's economic wellbeing,” wrote Sanders in a column for the Huffington Post. “And, perhaps most importantly, no institution in America should be above the law. We need to break up these institutions because of the tremendous damage they have done to our economy.”

Wedding Bells

The Supreme Court on Tuesday and Wednesday heard arguments on the constitutionality of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act and the legality of Proposition 8 in California, which rescinded that state’s same-sex marriage law. As a member of the House, Sanders voted against the Defense of Marriage Act when it passed in 1996. He is a cosponsor today of Senate legislation to repeal the law, which denies tens of thousands of legally married same-sex couples the same rights afforded legally married men and women under more than 1,000 federal laws and regulations.

Keep Saturday Mail

Citing a legal opinion by the Government Accountability Office, Sanders called on Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe to withdraw his plan to stop Saturday mail delivery. Sanders said the opinion by the non-partisan GAO unambiguously declared that the Postal Service has no legal authority to end Saturday mail without the approval of Congress. In fact, Congress recently passed a bill that restated the requirement for the Postal Service to maintain Saturday mail delivery. Sanders called on the postmaster general to formally withdraw his plan to eliminate Saturday mail beginning on Aug. 1. “I am urging you to make it clear to the American people that the USPS will continue Saturday mail delivery in adherence with the law,” Sanders said in a letter.

Storm Recovery

In one of the largest single grants to the state to help after Tropical Strom Irene, Sens. Sanders and Patrick Leahy and Rep. Peter Welch on Wednesday announced that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released almost $18 million in community rebuilding funds to Vermont from a disaster relief appropriations bill passed by Congress and signed by the President in January. Altogether, Vermont now has received more than $430 million in federal assistance to help the state rebuild after Irene.