Kamala Harris is headed to Guatemala and Mexico City.
The vice president has been to at least 15 states since March but hasn’t visited any part of the Mexico-United States border, nor held a press conference on the crisis in the 75 days since President Joe Biden risibly announced “she’s the most qualified person to do it, to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle.”
The humanitarian travesty at the border that erupted shortly after she and Biden took office has not diminished, as crossings and encounters between illegal migrants and border patrol agents remain at a 20-year high.
In a whirlwind 1,850-word piece Sunday morning, even CNN confessed there’s no strategy, and claims the embattled Harris “will try to deepen the United States’ “strategic partnership and bilateral relationship” with Guatemala and Mexico.”
Riveting stuff.
The new administration famously hopes to focus on diplomatic efforts in Mexico and the so-called Northern Triangle countries. They believe addressing “root causes” that push migrants to the southwest border will solve issues.
This is all claptrap. We can’t even stop progressive policies from causing millions to flee California and New York but Harris can fix El Salvador and Honduras?
“She says she’s looking for root causes but the place she needs to go is the border, because you get to see the stories,” Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX) said this weekend. “One of the challenges for those of us who have been is conveying how bad it is. People think you’re embellishing just at the point where you’re beginning to scratch the surface.”
The administration, however, appears content with the VP’s underwhelming performance on this intractable issue, because they’re now moving onto a more conspiratorial matter.
With his legislative agenda stalled, Biden also announced last week that Harris would lead the administration’s efforts of “protecting voting rights.”
Even though 2020 saw record turnout, the president and his allies believe — or want Americans to believe — that Republicans are engaged in an “assault on democracy.” The New York Times deemed it “another difficult role.” I suppose tackling a non-existent issue is difficult.
The Biden administration disingenuously presumes the worst of many innocuous state-level voting bills, most of which simply increase transparency and codify the conventions that made voting during the pandemic easier.
“At most, Harris can be expected to channel the indignation we hear from much of the Democratic voting base whenever any Republican legislature seeks to limit open-ended access to the franchise, no matter how well-reasoned and justified those reforms may be,” Noah Rothman wrote at Commentary Magazine. “But if the vice president is expected to produce results, it’s not at all clear what those could be.”
The vice president is one of the least popular politicians in America, with favorability ratings far below Biden. She is 25 points underwater among independents, 44 percent of whom say they have a “very unfavorable” opinion of Harris.
“For a vice president to engender such feelings — especially at this stage in the cycle — is unusual, to say the least,” Charles Cooke wrote last month. “Still, that Harris is unpopular should come as no great surprise, given that she somehow manages to combine into a single package a transparent insincerity, an unvarnished authoritarianism, and a tendency toward precisely the sort of self-satisfied progressivism that helped the Republicans to limit their losses at the last general election.”
I explained last Tuesday on “Alpha News Live” that Harris appears eager to build a portfolio that allows her to accumulate résumé-building “occurrences” — not necessarily successful results — and use that to counter criticism and promote her career, despite monumental failures.
With an administration apathetic to restrictive border policies, and desperate to avoid horrifying images, it makes sense to flood the zone with vague policies and keep the vacuous VP away.
A.J. Kaufman
A.J. Kaufman is an Alpha News columnist. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, Florida Sun-Sentinel, Indianapolis Star, Israel National News, Orange County Register, St. Cloud Times, Star-Tribune, and across AIM Media Midwest and the Internet. Kaufman previously worked as a school teacher and military historian.
