By itself, it was just one of many confrontational moments during Fox News anchor Bret Baier’s interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. “Come on, you and I both know what I’m talking about,” Harris pleaded after Baier noted that 79% of voters say the country is on the wrong track after 3 1/2 years of Harris in office.
“I actually don’t. What are you talking about?” Baier responded.
“What I’m talking about is that over the last decade. … It is clear to me and certainly the Republicans who are onstage with me … that people are exhausted with someone who professes to be a leader who spends full time demeaning and engaging in personal grievances, and it being about him instead of the American people. People are tired of that.”
If this justification for a candidacy sounds familiar, that people are tired of former President Donald Trump’s divisiveness and we just need to elect a Democrat to turn the page on the Trump era, it should. It is exactly the message then-candidate Joe Biden ran on in 2019.
“The country is sick of the division,” Biden said in Philadelphia in May 2019. “They’re sick of the fighting. They’re sick of the childish behavior,” he continued in a clear reference to Trump. “I know some of the smart folks say Democrats don’t want to hear about unity. The angrier a candidate can be, the better chance they have to win the nomination. I don’t believe it. I really don’t. I believe Democrats want to unify this nation.”
But Biden didn’t actually have a plan to heal politics or end divisiveness beyond removing Trump from office. That was the entire plan. And that is Harris’s plan. Just vote against Trump this one more time, and Democrats will be able to work with Republicans on a bipartisan basis to get things done.
It was, at best, a naive theory when Biden sold it in 2020, and it is an outright lie when Harris peddles it today. Just look at the complete fiction she keeps spinning on border security.
To hear Harris tell it, it was the Democratically controlled Congress’s failure to pass the Biden-Harris mass amnesty plan that first caused the border crisis, not the dozens of executive orders issued by Biden mandating the catch and release of illegal immigrants into the country.
Then, after years of either ignoring the problem or actively making it worse through those executive orders, all while insisting in multiple interviews that the border was secure, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas finally negotiated new legislation with, according to Harris, “some of the most conservative members of the United States Congress.” She said that legislation would have then passed Congress, thus securing the border, if only Trump had not called members of Congress to kill it.
This story fits Harris’s pitch for the presidency perfectly. Democrats had secured a bipartisan solution to an important national issue, border security, and it would have been successfully implemented but for Trump. If only Trump would just disappear, then Washington could work again.
Unfortunately for Harris, her border security story is pure fiction. It was the Biden-Harris administration that caused the border crisis by not only releasing illegal immigrants into the country at the border but also refusing to deport ones already here. Neither the amnesty legislation first proposed by the Biden-Harris administration when they first came to office nor the border security bill negotiated by Mayorkas with one lone Republican, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), would have done anything to prevent any of the murders committed by illegal immigrants against young women.
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In fact, the Senate rejected the bill on a bipartisan basis, with six Democrats voting against it along with Lankford. If anything, the Lankford border bill would have made the existing crisis worse by codifying the Biden-Harris catch-and-release parole policies. If a President Kamala Harris were to introduce the legislation again in 2025, it would fail to pass a single chamber of Congress because it is bad policy.
The reality is that Biden is unpopular because his policies are unpopular, and Harris would, at best, continue those policies or, worse, move them further to the left. Voters do not want Biden’s inflationary spending policies, catch-and-release border policies, or electric vehicle mandates. Voters want to turn the page from Harris, not to her.