President Biden has tapped Vice President Kamala Harris to address his self-inflicted immigration crisis now playing out across our southern border. What will this presidential directive mean when it comes to addressing this unfolding human tragedy?
Ronald Reagan, in myriad ways (taxes, regulations, welfare reform, defense, the Soviet Union), demonstrated that people respond to incentives. Reward noncitizens for crossing into the United States illegally and they’ll storm our borders. There’s no pretending otherwise: Biden’s January 2021 executive orders repealing Trump’s border-protection policies created today’s mess.
Most federal policy and operational issues are handled by the relevant cabinet departments and agencies. The White House has two principal roles: it can serve as the center for executive-branch policy development and as a crisis-management center. Crisis management is a near daily staple in most White Houses whether the president is a Democrat or a Republican: easy issues are resolved elsewhere.
Consider how Trump’s White House handled the coronavirus outbreak. Trump initially dismissed the virus as just a mild flu that would disappear by itself in a few weeks. As infections spread and deaths mounted, White House briefings were at first handled by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar, assisted by Dr. Anthony Fauci and others.
To his credit, Azar had previously served as Deputy HHS Secretary and as president of a major pharmaceutical company. His professional experience was directly relevant to the growing crisis at hand.
Nonetheless, a few weeks later, as the viral outbreak worsened, Trump abruptly moved Azar aside and replaced him with Vice President Pence. To his political detriment, however, non-physician Trump dominated the daily briefings in ways that ultimately undermined his personal and political credibility (remember ingesting bleach?). Moreover, his daily White House press corps skirmishes made the messaging mostly about him, not the pandemic. His unbridled personality displays cost him a second term.
As Kamala Harris steps into Pence’s crisis-management shoes, she has already undermined her credibility with biased remarks about ICE – the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Moreover, unlike Pence who was a former Indiana governor, Harris has no experience running much of anything besides offices staffed with attorneys. Commandeering a massive federal law-enforcement operation hundreds of miles away from the White House and involving foreign governments as well as multiple federal, state and local government agencies will be a new experience for Harris.
Additionally, Harris’s 2018 comments while a U.S. senator make her unsuited to lead this initiative. She has supported decriminalizing illegal border crossings and grilled then acting head of ICE, Ronald Vitiello, on whether he was aware of “a perception” that ICE agents used their power to cause fear and to intimidate.
There’s an old Washington saying (perhaps the precursor to “fake news”) that “perception is reality.” Then-Sen. Harris chose to play the perception game to put Vitiello on the defensive: one can never argue against “perceptions” which the media usually considers “perceived reality.” These were cheap, manipulative shots by Harris, and she knew it.
Harris wanted to brand Vitiello and his agency as incompetent and insensitive. The actual facts on the ground at the border didn’t matter. Nor do these facts seem to matter today, as the Biden administration works assiduously to frustrate media scrutiny wherever possible.
Kamala Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016, continuing the rapid political ascent facilitated by her mentor and intimate friend, Willie Brown, San Francisco’s former mayor and a powerful former speaker of California’s General Assembly. She’s a career politician with zero private-sector experience.
Barack Obama spent nearly four years in the U.S. Senate (mostly penning a memoir) before securing the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Harris has emulated Obama’s meteoric rise: less than four years after entering the U.S. Senate, Harris found herself as Joe Biden’s vice presidential running-mate. Not bad for the candidate who played the race card against Biden in their first 2019 presidential debate.
Harris’s lack of management experience shows. A lobbyist friend who followed closely Harris’s work as California’s junior Senator tells me that Harris did little for the state and its citizens. Her Senate work was mostly about advancing her own career and building her resume.
At President Biden’s first major press conference on March 25, 2021, he answered a reporter’s question about the 2024 presidential election by stating that he expected to seek a second term.
Between now and then, let’s wish President Biden truly excellent health, as his understudy has much to study.
Charles Kolb served as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy from 1990-1992 in the George H.W. Bush White House