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Seeing how they are not passing meaningful legislation (or most appropriations bills), and now that they no longer care about Hunter Biden, House Republicans have to find something else to occupy their time. After all, as GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance would surely say, idle hands are the devil’s playthings.
Enter Vice President Kamala Harris.
Now that it looks as though she will become the Democratic nominee, House Republicans rolled up their sleeves and got to work.
Their mission: Pass a completely meaningless resolution condemning the administration of President Joe Biden in general, and Harris in particular, for their “failure to secure the United States border.”
Well, to be fair, it’s only meaningless in terms of an actual consequence.
However, the real purpose of the resolution was to give conservative news outlets yet another reason to talk about immigration and border security, which is a winning issue for the GOP.
And in that regard, they struck gold.
First of all, coverage of the resolution, combined with the Trump campaign’s best efforts to paint Harris as the leading figure on this issue, sparked debate over whether the vice president was officially named “border czar” (which isn’t officially a thing… and it did not happen), and whether the media outlets who ever referred to her as such were now scrubbing their articles to edit out these mentions.
In other words, the GOP got to blame Harris and the media for something.
To be fair, the media does deserve some blame for calling the vice president “border czar” out of convenience.
Fact checkers were quick to point out that this was never Harris’s title.
Instead, Biden, in a meeting on March 24, 2021, asked his vice president to “lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that […] are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.”
He later once again emphasized that Harris would lead “the diplomatic effort” and that there would be an entire team to address the problem as a whole.
In her remarks, the vice president then also made it clear that her involvement would be communicating with other countries in efforts to stem the flow of immigrants to the US.
Now, if you want to criticize her for doing a poor job in that regard, that would be fair.
But this isn’t about being fair, it’s about scoring points, so we will hear a lot about the “border czar” going forward… as though Harris were supposed to pick up a rifle and patrol the border.
In fact, the words appear in the very first line of the resolution as it was introduced in the House.
And, of course, the media once again blew it by giving Harris an imaginary title back in 2021 and only now realizing how this is feeding into 2024 GOP propaganda.
The second major victory for House Republicans was that six vulnerable Democrats voted with them, which means that there is now “bipartisan” condemnation of Harris.
In other words, score one for the GOP.
