Kamala Harris and the quiet pursuit of power.
Is President Joe Biden really in control of his presidency—or is he a puppet whose strings are being pulled and manipulated by Vice President Kamala Harris? One can never be entirely sure. Biden himself has referred to Harris as the president: on March 18th, the President made one of his frequent verbal missteps during a speech about COVID-19 vaccination. "When President Harris and I took ..." Biden started, before pausing—though not to correct himself, “… a virtual tour of a vaccination site in Arizona not long ago, one of the nurses on that tour injecting people, giving vax each shot, was like administering a dose of hope."
What can we be sure of? Harris’ dominance over Biden, which is most obvious in the area of policy
During the election, Biden made the same mistake back in September while running a virtual campaign from the basement of his Delaware home. "It makes it so much harder for military spouses to find good jobs and build their careers. That has to change," he said. "A Harris-Biden administration is going to relaunch that effort and keep pushing further to make it easier for military spouses and veterans to find meaningful careers to ensure teachers know how to support military children in their classrooms and to improve support for caregivers and survivors so much more than we do now."
He’s not the only one. Harris herself made the same mistake that same month. During a virtual roundtable with small business owners in Arizona, she detailed the support a “Harris Administration” would provide for America’s minority business owners.
Is this just more of the Biden tendency to flub his lines at the worst times? Is a career politician like President Joe Biden really so politically weak or naive to allow himself to be sidelined after a lifetime in the public square? How can we really know if President Biden—the man responsible for the “three strikes” crime bill of 1994—is the same man who would run for the presidency with a woman who declared that Black Lives Matter protests are “essential” to change the United States into a racially just nation. Biden has undergone a complete transformation, from a conservative Democrat to a socialist enabling president who seems capable of embracing any policy initiative from the left-wing of his party.
The thing is, we can never really be sure of Joe.
What can we be sure of? Harris’ dominance over Biden, which is most obvious in the area of policy. Regardless of who Americans did (or did not) vote for in November, this is a Harris presidency, and Joe just seems to be around for the ride.
[caption id="attachment_188642" align="aligncenter" width="1920"]
Vice President Kamala Harris.[/caption]
EVEN AS SHE FAILS ABYSMALLY, BIDEN MOUNTS RESPONSIBILITIES ON HIS VP
Vice President Kamala Harris has been close to the presidency from Day 1. On Inauguration Day, Harris stood behind the President as he sat at a desk and slowly signed his first installment executive orders that are transforming America from a land of liberty to a socialist state. Naturally, she looked like she was pulling the strings. Things rapidly escalated after that.
This may have been an understandable move if the Vice President had the requisite resume for such a task—but she does not.
Since the John F. Kennedy administration, most U.S. presidents have often acted as their own secretary of state, no matter the experience or qualifications of the individual who actually holds that office. President Biden has apparently eschewed that role and placed the mantle of foreign affairs on Harris. "After insisting for the last few months that she didn’t need a clear-cut portfolio in the Biden administration, Vice President Kamala Harris is now trying to carve out a niche in foreign policy, with the President’s encouragement," reports Politico. "Biden wants Harris to catch up and has urged her to engage with foreign leaders directly and develop her own rapport with key U.S. partners." For good measure, they add: "Another, more strategic reason for the encouragement: as the heir apparent to the Democratic Party—especially if Biden, who is 78 years old, doesn’t run for re-election—Harris needs to bulk up her foreign policy expertise, and fast."
This may have been an understandable move if the Vice President had the requisite resume for such a task—but she does not. She has spent her career outside of politics as a prosecutor and inside of politics focused on domestic issues, first in California, then at the federal level as a senator. But that hasn’t stopped her from being the voice of America to world leaders. "The Vice President thanked the Prime Minister for Norway’s close security partnership with the United States and generous contributions to development and health security efforts around the world," read a statement after one such conversation. Harris has also spoken with French President Emanuel Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—all independently of the President.
According to the Washington Post, “Harris’s mission, as directed by Biden, is to meet with heads of state and other officials to tackle the enduring problems, including poverty and violence, that spur people south of the U.S. border with Mexico to migrate to the United States. She is also being briefed by an array of experts on policies that affect the flow of migrants.” That explains why President Biden has also made the Vice President something of a “border czar,” though it’s not at all clear exactly what that means and what that job entails, only that Biden somehow feels she’s qualified for it. "I asked her, the VP, today, because she's the most qualified person to do it, to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle, and the countries that can help, need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border," the President told reporters on March 24th in the White House State Dining Room.
Still, it would be an understatement to say that the Vice President, who made an attempt to reject the designation “border czar,” has refused to take her new duties very seriously. Despite all of Biden’s belief in her skills, the Vice President has failed to or produce innovative plans for resolving a border crisis that is threatening to become a multi-layered national security issue. Harris has been put in charge of solving that crisis even though she once compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Ku Klux Klan.
Here, the Vice President—who has been tasked by the President to keep our borders safe—is completely ignoring the role that Mexican drug cartels play in aggravating the border catastrophe.
That’s not to say that Harris doesn’t recognize that something is amiss at the border, especially as migrant children pile up in COVID-19 Petri dishes and Mexican cartels drop unaccompanied minors over the border fence and then proceed to smuggle drugs into the country. “It seems this is all just a bit frustrating,” she told CBS This Morning.
"It's a huge problem. I'm not going to pretend it's not. It's a huge problem. Are we looking at overcrowding at the border in particular with these kids? Yes. Should these kids be in the custody of HHS, the Health and Human Services, instead of the Border Patrol? Yes. Should we be processing these cases faster? Yes. This is, however, not going to be solved overnight."
In the same interview, she promised that she and Biden would travel to the border "at some point,” in the same way that many people say they would like to visit Paris before they die. A few days later, when the VP was asked if she had plans to visit the border to see the crisis for herself. Harris laughed the question away, saying, “Not today.”
Vice President Harris says she believes the border crisis is the result of “root causes” that have nothing to do with her administration’s roll-back of former President Trump’s border policies, and the the decision to virtually allow illegal immigrants to cross the border without fear of deportation, and then be sent off on a bus to anywhere in the United States.
Instead, the issue is one of “root causes.” "And we are looking at, therefore, a number of issues that also relate to poverty, extreme poverty. And also, there's violence obviously coming out of those regions," she said in a meeting with Guatemala's president, Alejandro Giammattei. "When you look at the root causes, we're also looking at issues of corruption. Again, we're looking at the issue of climate resiliency and then the concern about a lack of economic opportunity."
Here, the Vice President—who has been tasked by the President to keep our borders safe—is completely ignoring the role that Mexican drug cartels play in aggravating the border catastrophe. She is refusing to acknowledge that these criminal enterprises are making millions of dollars off of smuggling children into the United States. As investigative journalist Lara Logan reports, the Biden administration is not only facilitating this cesspool of vice; it is financing it.
“The administration uses taxpayer dollars—your money, my money—every taxpayer in America. When they use their funds to transport these kids all over the country and send them into different markets, different areas first to live in for the cartels, different markets for sex trafficking and other cartel activity,” Logan told Fox News.
But let’s not let it be said that Vice President Harris has no presence at the border. Migrant children at one California shelter were probably bursting at the seams with joy when they discovered that Harris’ book was waiting for them. Superheroes Are Everywhere, a feel-good tome that Harris probably put together on her flights from Washington to California, appeared at the Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center, which has recently been transformed into a drop-in center for migrant kids. Harris’ office claims they had no idea how the book got there. Harris herself has said nothing on the issue—just as she has refused to hold a news conference to explain exactly what she is expected to accomplish as a border czar, besides having a series of Zoom conversations with Central American leaders who are probably wondering the same thing.
In the Biden administration—and if you’re Vice President Harris—failing at a task doesn’t generate opprobrium from the President, but even more responsibility. On May 1st, Harris was appointed the chairwoman of the National Space Council—yet another subject matter for which Harris is resoundingly unqualified.
[caption id="attachment_188641" align="aligncenter" width="1920"]
Vice President Kamala Harris.[/caption]
KAMALA HARRIS' FIRST 100 DAYS
Even if she is quietly waiting to replace him as she assiduously accretes power around her, the Vice President is at least a stalwart supporter of Joe Biden, even going so far as saying that he has been “clear” about his stand on court packing—an issue, that, as we have seen, Biden has not been clear for almost 40 years when he called it a “boneheaded idea” during his Senate years.
[T]he President has apparently experienced a socialist epiphany in the winter of his life...
Of course, Kamala Harris was not always so supportive of Joe Biden, taking specific issue with his lack of consistency on policy issues. During the Democratic presidential nomination contest, Harris’ most memorable moment as a candidate was when she inferred that Biden was a racist for not supporting school busing during the early 1970s.
It may be fair to say Biden had not matured politically as a young senator, that he had years of policy growth yet to come, and that it is not fair to judge him by his statements during those years. But, let’s face it, most people arrive at some sort of political equilibrium by the time they reach their mid-thirties, and their political ideology is not apt to shift significantly to the left or right. If anything, as Winston Churchill noted, people are more apt to become increasingly conservative with age. But the President has apparently experienced a socialist epiphany in the winter of his life—or he is just willing to mouth the words in order to retain a semblance of control and the illusion of really being in power.
There is really no other way to explain his first 100 days that have included a flurry of government-empowering executive orders, congressional legislation that is burning up trillions of dollars, and promises to spend trillions more on “economic recovery,” “instrasture,” and now, as revealed in his address to a joint session of Congress last week, billions more on daycare. And who can forget the President’s support for the Democratic “For the People Act”legislation is hard left and much more consistent with Harris’s style than Biden’s history.
Instead, President Biden’s legacy so far reads like something that Kamala Harris would have promulgated in her first 100 days in office—the woman judged to be the most “liberal senator” of 2019. The President’s recent caressing of gun control and declaring that “no amendment to the Constitution is absolute” is something right out of the Kamala Harris playbook—further illustrating just who is really in charge here.
It is unlikely that Biden will be able to serve a second term even if he successfully finishes his first and wins re-election. But that may be ultimately irrelevant. He is already governing, not like good old moderate Joe Biden, but like radical Kamala Harris. Whether she has the title of president or not, she is wielding that control and flaunting that power.
