On the first night of the Democratic National Convention last week, President Joe Biden was taken out of cold storage to give a speech safely out of both prime time and the limelight of the later days of the shindig.
However, even in the late hours of an August Monday night, the president managed to say something that should alarm many Americans. He’s said it in various forms before, and he’ll doubtlessly say it in some permutation again. But the message was loud and clear: Harris wasn’t just a backup plan in case something unfortunate happened to the president, but instead an integral part of his administration’s fabric.
“Selecting Kamala was the very first decision I made when I became our nominee,” he said. “And it was the best decision I made in my whole career.”
“Now that we’ve gotten to know each other, we’ve become close friends. She’s tough. She’s experienced. And she has enormous integrity.”
In fact, the two were so close that they got to calling the White House the “Biden-Harris administration,” breaking with the tradition of simply calling the administration the province of the man who’s supposed to be in charge.
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This all bears noting because Joe Biden was already polling terribly before his catastrophic June 27 debate performance revealed to the world that rumors of significant organic mental decline were hardly just rumors. Harris, somehow, was polling worse than him.
In the weeks since Biden has stepped aside, Harris has recast herself as an avatar of “joy” and “good vibes,” which has led to a significant bounce in the Democrats’ fortunes. But joy and vibes aren’t policy. Policy is policy. And Kamala Harris, in case America has forgotten, was and is instrumental in the Biden-Harris administration policy that was so unpopular even before the debate from hell.
In case you’ve forgotten, here are just four of Harris’ failures as Joe Biden’s “best decision I made in my whole career.”
1. The border crisis
You’ve heard it before, you’ll hear it again: Kamala Harris was never the “border czar.” This is technically true, but only technically — because there’s no position actually called “border czar.”
But make no mistake: Harris was charged by the president with securing the border and failed miserably at doing so.
The media line is that Harris’ real role was to address the “root causes” of illegal immigration, which is a phrase just as nebulous and meaningless as “border czar.” That’s not quite accurate. In fact, President Biden himself made it particularly clear during a media briefing on March 24, 2021, that Harris had a wide-ranging purview to solve the border crisis. His exact words, from a White House transcript of the event:
[B]efore we took office, in the midst of the last administration’s somewhat draconian policies of separating children from their parents, et cetera, what happened was that we — we found that there were a serious spike in the number of people heading to the southern border, even in the midst of that. … So this new surge we’re dealing with now started with the last administration, but it’s our responsibility to deal with it humanely and to — and to stop what’s happening.
And so, this increase has been consequential, but the Vice President has agreed — among the multiple other things that I have her leading — and I appreciate it — agreed to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept re- — the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders — at their borders.
That sounds a lot closer to “border czar” than “root causes czar” to pretty much anyone willing to pay attention. Yet, Harris did little about the problem, and the border crisis swelled to levels unseen before, with every month seeming to bring a new record in the number of illegal immigrant encounters by Border Patrol and an immigration court system so clogged that some migrants caught and released were given court dates in the 2030s.
Harris refused to visit the border for months after being given the assignment, and her biggest accomplishment seemed to be getting multinational corporations to invest some capital in the so-called Northern Triangle countries of Central America — Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — in hopes of stemming the tide. That, unsurprisingly, didn’t work.
Now, she’s pretending to be tough on the border using her experience as a prosecutor — as well as using footage of Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” — in ads.
Kamala Harris — who relentlessly trashed President Trump’s border wall — is now featuring it in her ads.
She’ll do anything to avoid being exposed as the Radical Left lunatic she is! pic.twitter.com/XokF5cq7yb
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 26, 2024
Nice try.
2. Her lack of leadership as head of the National Space Council
You may have heard that a few astronauts are stuck up at the International Space Station because the craft they took up there has a few issues that can’t be sorted out. They won’t be returning to earth until February, when a SpaceX Dragon capsule will take them home.
Now, a goodly part of the reason why an eight-day mission has turned into a months-long odyssey in space has no small part to do with aerospace giant Boeing, which has had some, um, problems of late. But don’t overlook Harris’ role, since she’s been the National Space Council chair since 2021.
The editorial board of the New York Post, while acknowledging that “a series of poor decisions by NASA and Boeing leadership” have left astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams stranded at the ISS, said that by abandoning plans to return the astronauts to earth on the Boeing Starliner and putting their return off until after the election, they’re effectively “being held hostage by Kamala Harris’ political ambitions.”
“Sticking Williams and Wilmore back on the glitchy Starliner would be too much of a risk to her presidential prospects,” the editorial board wrote in an Aug. 15 piece.
“And then someone might notice just how asleep at the wheel she’s been as head of the NSC,” the board continued. “Harris has only chaired three public Space Council meetings, the latest last December, where she ‘spoke at the start of that meeting but left immediately thereafter, leaving an adviser to chair the meeting,’ according to SpaceNews.
“Her predecessor, Vice President Mike Pence, chaired eight NSC meetings in the four Donald Trump years,” the board added. “And her input was irrelevant to issues like building a functional, reliable space program. For example: At that Dec. 20, 2023, meeting, she announced three priorities for space, starting with ‘tackling the climate crisis.’”
Something tells me that the astronauts on the ISS aren’t too focused on the climate crisis right now. Just a hunch.
3. Her role in America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan
We just commemorated an ignominious anniversary in recent American history: our sudden, chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, which left the country in Taliban hands and also left 13 members of the United States military dead in a bombing at Kabul airport as the panicked withdrawal unfolded.
And while the unconditional withdrawal was ultimately Biden’s decision, Harris played a large part in it — as she told CNN’s Dana Bash in April 2021, months before the carnage unfolded:
🚨Kamala Harris was behind the botched Afghanistan withdrawal that resulted in 13 dead American service members:
CNN: “Joe Biden just made a really big decision—Afghanistan—were you the last person in the room?”
Kamala: “Yes.”
CNN: “And you feel comfortable?”
Kamala: “I do.” pic.twitter.com/GyNdBaZDry
— Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) August 26, 2024
She was the last person in the room aside from Biden when that decision was made. How did that turn out?
Absolute choas at Kabul’s airport. Here’s a US military plane ready for takeoff surrounded and climbed by Afghans desperate to leave the country after Taliban has taken over control yesterday.
This does look like anything but a peaceful transition. https://t.co/Z818UAhZX7
— Hatice ‘Deniz’ AVCI (@HaticeDenizAVCI) August 16, 2021
Let’s hope we never find out what happens when Kamala Harris isn’t just the last person in the room aside from Joe Biden, but the last person in the room, period.
4. Cast the tie-breaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act
In case you’ve forgotten the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, here’s a spoiler alert: It did nothing to reduce inflation. In fact, it was never even intended to do any such thing; the omnibus spending bill was essentially a green infrastructure giveaway and tax hike. That inflation has abated somewhat is mostly incidental; as Preston Brashers of the Heritage Foundation noted, even President Biden acknowledged when the IRA was being proposed that the rate of inflation was slowing.
Instead, the plan back-loaded the spending, so that the real costs of the bill are hidden — and will add significantly to U.S. debt that already tops $31 trillion. Furthermore, it steps up IRS enforcement by beefing up the number of agents our revenue service has, meaning that the federal government aims to shake you down for as much money as it can to close the gap between promises and reality.
Because the Senate was deadlocked 50-50 on the proposal, Harris, in her role as vice president, cast the tie-breaking vote in the upper chamber.
And for what? Federally subsidized EV charging stations? Green power giveaways? Obamacare subsidies? Even Joe Biden said he wishes he “hadn’t called it” the Inflation Reduction Act. But Harris voted for it — and the rest, sadly, is history.
These are just but four of the many decisions made by the woman President Joe Biden called “the best decision I made in my whole career.” If you think his judgment was bad, God help us if that fantastic decision of his starts making the decisions all on her own.
