Report: Democrats Are Considering the 'Nuclear Option' for Kamala Harris
What to do with Kamala Harris?
With President Joe Biden at age 79, pushing 82 by the time of the next presidential election in 2024, and already of questionable acuity, there’s growing consensus he will not be running again.
In a normal world, the mantle would be assumed by the vice president, Kamala Harris. But with dismal poll numbers and no apparent knack for her job, the buzz in Washington is that Harris has got to go.
There’s been talk of a “nuclear option,” which is defined as getting rid of Kamala Harris by putting her on the U.S. Supreme Court, according to the U.K’s Telegraph.
With Kamala Harris looking unelectable, the Democrats are considering the nuclear option.
Whispers in Washington suggest Joe Biden’s camp has a plan to find a more popular replacement ahead of the 2024 battle#Thread ?
?Evelyn Hockstein/ Reutershttps://t.co/Gjp2GSg0pY pic.twitter.com/QYiZtuNdkf
— Telegraph World News (@TelegraphWorld) November 29, 2021
Such a move is reported to admittedly be “improbable,” but reflects desperation on the part of the Biden administration, wrestling with not only its own low poll numbers but with those of Harris, which are even lower.
This raises the question: How did Harris get to be vice president to begin with, especially when her presidential run in 2020 was so poor that she had to make an early exit from the campaign?
You know the answer — and it was voiced on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson program by Larry Elder, talk show host and unsuccessful Republican gubernatorial candidate.
“The only reason, in my opinion, she became vice president is because she checked all the boxes. The Democrats in this woke era are no longer going to have two white males on the ticket,” Elder said.
“It’s got to be at least a person of color, hopefully a person of color who was a female. So [Biden] checked all the boxes. It’s proven itself to be basically utterly incompetent,” he continued.
“She has even accused Joe Biden of being racist. She’s not unwilling to pull the race card in order to defend herself. That has offended a lot of people.”
Given the usual powerlessness of the office of vice president, there is normally not much demanded of the occupant.
However, in recent years, presidents have called upon their political understudies to assume more critical roles: former Vice President Mike Pence served then-President Donald Trump in the COVID-19 crisis, Biden used his long-term congressional contacts to aid former President Barack Obama, former VP Dick Cheney played a major foreign policy role in the administration of George W. Bush and so on.
Harris got charged with an impossible task: representing the Biden administration on the southern border, especially given the administration’s tacit refusal to protect it.
Wisely or unwisely, for a long time, Harris declined to even go south, no doubt recognizing it was not in her political interest to represent the open border policy of Democrats and the administration against television views of thousands of unvetted and unvaccinated people coming into the country.
That fostered a perception of incompetence, and coupled with an unconvincing on-camera personality, it dropped Harris’ poll numbers to 28 percent approval, according to USA Today, in early November. That doesn’t help Biden, struggling with his own 41.8 percent approval rating, according to the Real Clear Politics average of 15 polls as of Sunday.
Ironically, White House press secretary Jan Psaki has claimed the obvious reason Harris got her current office — her gender and race — are the reasons she’s being criticized.
“I do think that it has been easier and harsher from some in the right wing who have gone after her because she is the first woman, the first woman of color. I’m not suggesting anyone will acknowledge that publicly, but I think there’s no question that the type of attacks, the attacks on her, that certainly being the first she is many times over is part of that,” Psaki said in mid-November, according to Townhall.
Yet, even leftist CNN has used the word “dysfunction” in describing the vice president.
And she has not been aided by reports of infighting with Team Biden and with the announced resignation in mid-November of her communications director, Ashley Etienne.
So what to do with her? It’s unlikely that she would resign, unless she could be convinced that she would have no chance of winning election to the presidency in 2024.
Perhaps a cushy ambassadorship could lure her to step aside, but in the long run that would be dependent upon Democratic re-election to the presidency in three years, difficult to imagine without a vibrant new candidate or election fraud on steroids.
So maybe, for Democrats, the nuclear option — Harris for the Supreme Court — would not be so farfetched. She could replace Justice Stephen Breyer, who, at age 83, is the oldest member of the court. So far, he has resisted Democrat urgings to retire while Democrats have some advantage in the Senate.
But consider this: If a confirmation vote for Harris for the Supreme Court went along party lines with a 50-50 split between Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, who would break the tie?
Vice President Kamala Harris!
Each day gets stranger and stranger…
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