Remember Kamala Harris? – Vice President Kamala Harris became the first woman to preside over the opening day of the United States Senate on Tuesday when she swore in 35 newly elected and re-elected senators.
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It was a historic moment, but it was also a reminder that former California Senator Kamala Harris is indeed the vice president, and that she is, in fact, still in politics.
Hard to believe, right?
Ever since being tasked with overseeing the border crisis, and utterly failing to do anything about it, it seems as though Harris has taken more of a backseat than originally intended.
Initially considered a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination in 2024, should Biden choose not to stand, or 2028 if Biden does run and win, Harris has lost whatever power or popularity she had in the weeks after she was sworn in.
And frankly, besides some very short-lived momentum when she ran in 2016 and flammed out, she was never particularly popular, to begin with.
No longer the next president in waiting, Kamala Harris now seems to serve an almost entirely ceremonial function while the Biden administration focuses on painting failures as victories and repairing the damage done to the economy in time for the 2024 presidential election.
What Is Kamala Harris Up To?
In 2021, Kamala Harris was tasked with leading the response to the border crisis.
The vice president flew to central America and met with government leaders to discuss ways to prevent the influx of millions of illegal aliens from the south, and despite several trips and promises that the border is “secure,” Harris has little to show for it.
Migrant border crossings in 2022 topped 2.76 million, breaking the previous record by more than a million.
There have also been a total of 4 million border encounters since Harris was assigned to address the “root cause” of the issue.
Having utterly failed on the border, Harris’ latest assignment appears to be traveling the country to spread the good news about President Joe Biden. Harris is expected in Chicago on Wednesday, where she will discuss the achievements of the Biden administration.
In a briefing, the White House said that Harris would be spreading the news of how the White House has created “good-paying jobs,” rebuilt the country’s infrastructure, and begun “revitalizing communities left behind.”
Now that the Senate is not evenly split, Senate Democrats no longer rely entirely on Harris’ tie-breaking vote to pass legislation, meaning she’ll have the time to travel even more.
2023 could well be the year that Kamala Harris re-emerges into the public eye, but it looks like most of her time will be spent preaching rather than doing.
Jack Buckby is 19FortyFive’s Breaking News Editor. He is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society.
