WASHINGTON, DC, May 22 — Kamala Harris must be working in deep — very deep — cover at her job of dealing with the crisis on our southern border. As Senator John Cornyn [R-TX] opined recently: “It appears to me like President Biden handed her a hand grenade and pulled the pin, and she was quick to get rid of it as fast as she could.”
Cornyn is not the only one who is frustrated with Vice President Harris for her “do nothing” attitude regarding the assignment handed her by President Biden. Rep. Ashley Hinson, R-IA, has actually introduced legislation to cut off her travel expenses until she visits the southern border and provides a way to solve the crisis there. Hinson told Fox News that she was reacting to the fact that Harris has been a no-show at the border since the day she was given the assignment of handling the crisis.
The vice president’s job is to “deal” with the overwhelming onslaught of would-be undocumented immigrants trying to enter the U.S. and who sense it’s gotten easier to do now that President Trump is not calling the shots. After all, isn’t President Biden hell-bent on tearing down Mr. Trump’s wall?
Andrew R. Arthur at the Center for Immigration Studies has been tracking Ms. Harris’ progress or lack thereof, dubbing her the “border czar.” In a recent online post, he said that it really is past time that she got to work: “Given that most of the migrants claiming asylum at the southwest border allege that they are fleeing corruption and gang violence (and that smuggling is facilitated by Mexican drug cartels), you would figure that Harris would have sufficient familiarity with the situation in Mexico and the Northern Triangle to jump right into her new position.” But that hasn’t been the case.
Perhaps that is the reason media coverage of Harris’s progress has been sparse. It consists mostly of reports that she “finds herself navigating strained relations with the leaders of Central American countries,” as a recent Bloomberg story put it. However, news outlets are mostly left with noting what hasn’t been done instead of what has been done. They report about her apparent aversion to traveling to the border, or they make excuses for her as CNN did when it reported: “While aides work in the background, Harris has been busy getting up to speed on the region’s specifics.”
Can you blame the reporters for the skimpy coverage? Perhaps it is a reaction to the notion that Harris doesn’t like them. “The vice president and her team tend to dismiss reporters. Trying to get her to take a few questions after events is treated as an act of impish aggression. And Harris herself tracks political players and reporters whom she thinks don’t fully understand her or appreciate her life experience,” writes Edward-Isaac Dovere in a profile published in The Atlantic last week. He goes on to note that “At times, she comes off as so uninteresting that television producers have started to wonder whether spending thousands of dollars to send people on trips with her is worthwhile, given how little usable material they get out of it.”
Newsmen and women apparently are not the only ones who find Harris unlikeable. Last week the Politico magazine previewed a new book that Dovere wrote. It’s called Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump, in which he describes how President Biden’s wife, Jill, apparently went ballistic after Harris beat up on him during the presidential campaign last year, virtually accusing him of being a racist.
Afterward, it seems Mrs. Biden vented on Harris during a telephone call with friends. She said: “With what he cares about, what he fights for, what he’s committed to, you get up there and call him a racist without basis?” Go f— yourself,” according to Dovere.