Biden Has Dementia. What Does Kamala Harris Have?

Is Kamala Harris A Political Landmine Underneath The Democrats?

At this point, it has become trite to say the Democrats have screwed themselves bigly backing Joe Biden’s re-election bid. Faced with the undeniable reality of Biden’s advancing dementia, the Democrats have managed to continue to shoot themselves in the foot time and again.

It is truly staggering to contemplate just the number of tactical and strategic blunders the Democrats made to find themselves at bizarre junction of incompetence and impotence. Political missteps and gaffes are nothing new to politics, but to string together this many political mistakes, miscues, gaffes, and blunders is a truly historic level of political stupidity.

Remarkably, faced with such a colossal display of political ineptitude, the Democrats have stubbornly refused to take the one measure that theoretically would bring all the drama surrounding Joe Biden to an end: tap Kamala Harris to be the 2024 Presidential nominee.

There has never been any real denial that having Biden debate Donald Trump on June 27th was a mistake.

That should not have happened and Biden’s campaign staff should have prevented it from happening—looking out for the candidate is their primary mission for obvious reasons. However, it happened.

Once the damage was done, one would think the Democrats would simply pivot to Kamala Harris, elevate her to the top of the ticket, and have corporate media go all out propagandizing her to overcome her horrendous poll numbers, numbers which even now voters prefer a senile Biden to VP Harris.

To be sure, corporate media will have quite the rebranding effort given just how far down Harris’ favorables have fallen. Even with a clear case of advancing dementia, Joe Biden is still seen as more favorable to voters than Kamala Harris.

There is even a lingering argument that Harris ultimately can’t be rebranded and rehabilitated by corporate media. Despite briefly enjoying better betting odds on gaining the Presidency than Joe Biden, even that questionable metric did not remain in Harris favor.

On the strength of the polling data alone, there is a credible argument for skipping over Harris and opening the nomination to a wider field of Democratic Presidential hopefuls.

Yet this argument flies in the face of apparent voter awareness that, should Biden somehow win re-election, Harris is highly likely to have to accede to the Presidency soon after.

Why Not "President Kamala"?

Among the most notable of Biden’s defenders: Vice President Kamala Harris. Indeed, the Hur report has, in the minds of some pundits, made her an essential part of Biden’s re-election campaign.

Fair or not, in the wake of special counsel Robert Hur’s damning assessment of President Biden’s mental fitness, Vice President Kamala Harris is now arguably one of, if not the, most important aspects of Biden’s reelection campaign.

Indeed, voters are acutely aware that Harris may well be forced to replace Biden midway through a potential second term. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of swing state voters say the vice-presidential candidate is “more important” in the 2024 election than in previous elections due to both Biden and Trump’s respective ages, per Bloomberg/Morning Consult polling.

One reason Harris might remain an acceptable Vice-Presidential candidate and not a Presidential candidate at this juncture is the fact that, should Biden step aside before the election, the awkward question would have to be asked about what Harris knew of Biden’s infirmities and when.

Perversely, another part of that answer may be that building up Kamala Harris as one capable to assume the duties of President while being a loyal and supportive Vice President is one of the reasons Robert Hur’s Special Counsel report does not fade away. Any positioning of Kamala Harris as a “backup” invariably brings attention back to the reality made plain by Hur that Joe Biden very likely is in need of such a backup. Thus Kamala herself is becoming a constant reminder that the Special Counsel documented Joe Biden’s cognitive deficits even as she works to rebut Special Counsel’s assertions about those deficits.

Being the loyal VP to a President on the decline may very well have made it impossible for the Democrats to put Harris at the top of the ticket in the fall election should Biden end up not running.

That is not a line of questioning any politician wants to answer.

Indeed, that conceivably was the logic for Harris remaining in the number two poosition in the aftermath of Robert Hur’s Special Counsel report where he declared Biden’s advancing senility as one reason for not preferring charges against him for mishandling classified documents after tenure as Vice President had ended.

Special Counsel Finds President Too Old To Be Charged In Documents Case

At that time, Biden’s senility still enjoyed a soupcon of plausible deniability. That deniability was completely obliterated on June 27th with Biden’s debate debacle.

The longer the “Biden has dementia” narrative remains active in corporate media (and as of this writing they show no interest in moving on to other stories), the less compelling the logic and tactic of allowing Harris to backdoor her way into the Oval Office becomes.

As of this writing, there have been a growing number of Democratic Party insiders coming out against Biden’s continued candidacy.

Yet none of those clamoring for Biden to step aside are backing Harris moving up to the top of the ticket. In fact, the Democrats are going so far as to entertain a “blitz primary” between now and the convention in August to select Biden’s replacement.

Their idea goes something like this, according to a memo shared with Semafor that has been circulated to Democratic donors and bundlers as well as officials within the Biden campaign and administration:

• Biden would step down as the Democratic nominee in mid-July, and announce the new system, with backing from Vice President Kamala Harris.

• Potential candidates would have a few days to throw their respective hats in the ring. The Democratic Party then would begin a primary sprint in which the six candidates who receive the most votes from delegates pledge to run positive-only campaigns in the month leading up to the convention.

• The “blitz primary” would involve weekly forums with each candidate moderated by cultural icons (Michelle Obama, Oprah, and Taylor Swift are among the names floated in the memo) in order to engage voters.

• The nominee would ultimately be chosen by the delegates using ranked choice voting before the start of the Chicago convention on Aug. 19.

• It would be announced with plenty of fanfare on the third day of the gathering. The memo imagines the nominee unveiled on stage with Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

That convolution is seen as preferable to Democratic strategists than endorsing a Kamala Harris candidacy. Seriously.

Why?

Why are Democrats so unwilling to entertain even the thought of Kamala Harris in the spotlight? If we presume the Democrats are acting rationally (which, given the very existence of this soap opera, is admittedly a stretch), we have to also presume that there is something very very radioactive about Kamala Harris.

Human trafficking might qualify.

And human trafficking would almost certainly be a focal point of Republican attack ads against a Kamala Harris candidacy.

We must remember that, in 2021, in order to give Harris something to do within his Administration, Biden tapped her to be the White House “czar” for dealing with the immigration crisis on the southern border.

With Harris in the lead, the Administration quickly got behind a “root cause” strategy that sought out-of-the-box solutions to improve the economies of Latin America, and so relieve the pressures driving so many individuals to risk the dangerous trek to the US southern border. The centerpiece of that strategy was an effort to improve colloborations between small coffee farmers and large coffee multinationals such as Nespresso.

It’s a long way from Washington and the raging debate over immigration and the political fights on cable news over the U.S.-Mexico border . But the expansion of a collaboration between small coffee farmers and Nespresso, a Swiss coffee giant, exemplifies the hope and limitations of a broader U.S. plan spearheaded by Vice President Kamala Harris that aims to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Pitched to American audiences as a way to curb migration, the plan is premised on enlisting government and private companies to address crises in the region, which include drug cartel violence, natural disasters, environmental degradation, poverty and corruption. It calls for spending as much as $4 billion in American taxpayer dollars and spurring at least $750 million in private investments seeding an array of economic and social programs intended to instill everything from a more functional digital economy to democratic values.

It was a strategy that failed to impress just about everyone, both here in America as well as in Central America.

A major flaw of the “root causes” strategy was that the countries it originally targeted were no longer the major contributors towards the flow of migrants coming to the border, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were replaced at the top of that list by Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti.

At the same time, Harris came under withering criticism for failing to visit the southern border itself.

In an interview that aired Tuesday morning on NBC's Today show, Harris was pressed about why she has yet to visit the U.S.-Mexico border, as she has been urged to do by lawmakers from both parties.

Harris flashed irritation. "And I haven't been to Europe. And I mean, I don't understand the point that you're making. I'm not discounting the importance of the border," she said, making the point that she was focused on solving the border problem at its source.

What has been largely overlooked, however, are the consequences of such “benign neglect” of the southern border itself.

One such consequence has been what can only be described as human trafficking, including of children, with the Biden Administration’s participation.

The reports in the corporate media have been sporadic, but they have been unequivocal: children time and again are being released into the hands of people not their actual guardians.

In 2021, with as many as 18,700 unaccompanied minors crossing the border each month, the agency set up 14 makeshift shelters around the country to deal with the influx and recruited government employees from across federal agencies to staff them. Biden administration officials said those employees weren’t necessarily trained in child welfare, and stressed that many factors go into decisions about where to send the minors. 

Following an internal investigation, the inspector general for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversaw a network of shelters caring for unaccompanied minors, found gaps in the process to screen temporary guardians. It said in February that 16% of records for children who were released to sponsors in March and April 2021 lacked evidence that a required safety check was conducted.

Even more disturbing is the documented fact that many of these “sponsors” are seeking to take multiple children, which some argue is a clear indicator of labor trafficking.

With the government struggling at the time to place children in safe homes, one caseworker said supervisors were warned that adoption attempts by some sponsors may indicate children were at risk because the sponsor was trying to take on at least a half-dozen children, a common indicator of labor trafficking.

It is established fact that many of these unaccompanied minors from the southern border wind up working long hours in dangerous jobs, often in flagrant violation of child labor laws.

In town after town, children scrub dishes late at night. They run milking machines in Vermont and deliver meals in New York City. They harvest coffee and build lava rock walls around vacation homes in Hawaii. Girls as young as 13 wash hotel sheets in Virginia.

Nor are the companies willing to exploit these children small “fly by night” companies. Quite the contrary, many are at the heart of the American economy:

Migrant child labor benefits both under-the-table operations and global corporations, The Times found. In Los Angeles, children stitch “Made in America” tags into J. Crew shirts. They bake dinner rolls sold at Walmart and Target, process milk used in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and help debone chicken sold at Whole Foods. As recently as the fall, middle-schoolers made Fruit of the Loom socks in Alabama. In Michigan, children make auto parts for Ford and General Motors.

Most damningly of all, however, is the reality that these children are the ones who were detained at the border and then released by officials at the border to various “sponsors”. The Department of Health and Human Services presumably monitors the status and situation of every child so released—except HHS has “lost” at least 85,000 children.

Whether through corruption or simple negligence, under Kamal Harris’ watch as “border czar”, the Biden Administration has been facilitating provable child labor trafficking.

This is documented. This is proven. The media reports are there, and they even provide the names and ages of some of the children.

Appallingly, the Biden Administration’s track record on child trafficking at the southern border appears to be even worse than Obama’s disgraceful record, in which the no less a corporate media mainstay (and Democrat propaganda shill) than the Washington Post blasted the Obama Administration for releasing children into the clutches of human traffickers.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) has demanded a response from the Obama administration to whistleblower claims that thousands of those children have been released to sponsors with criminal records that include homicide, child molestation and human trafficking. Legal advocates for the children say many have wound up in abusive situations, where they have been forced to work to repay debts or living expenses. Some children simply stop showing up for immigration hearings and vanish.

“We have a large percentage of these kids that disappear, and I don’t know what happens to them,” said Jessica Ramos, a lawyer with Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, an Ohio nonprofit group that represents children in immigration proceedings.

One data point that has since been ignored by both Republicans and the corporate media: The Obama Administration did not deny the crux of the charges:

Andrea Helling, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the Office of Refugee Resettlement, said the inspector general is investigating the whistleblower allegations. She acknowledged that the agency briefly relaxed identity requirements for family members collecting children at the height of the surge in May 2014 to help place children more quickly.

What was hopefully a merely a disgraceful lapse under Obama, however, became de facto practice under Biden—which is to say while Kamala Harris was the “border czar”.

While immigration and the crisis at the southern border remain hot-button issues for Republicans, who have gone so far as to vote articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the Democrats have been singularly disinterested in taking up the issue in any substantive way. Chuck Schumer led the Senate Democrats in dismissing the Mayorkas impeachment articles outright, refusing to even hold the called-for Senate trial.

By a vote of 51 to 48, with one senator voting “present,” the Senate ruled that the charge was unconstitutional because it failed to meet the constitutional bar of a high crime or misdemeanor. Republicans united in opposition except for Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the lone “present” vote, while Democrats were unanimous in favor, after arguing that a cabinet member cannot be impeached and removed merely for carrying out the policies of the administration he serves.

However, lost in the political maneuvering between Democrats and Republicans over the Mayorkas impeachment has been the tacit admission that Mayorkas was merely carrying out the policies of the Biden administration.

Arguably, Harris’ own failures as border czar would fall into the same realm of claimed unimpeachablility as Mayorkas’, given that she, too, has merely been carrying out the Biden Administration’s policies—and Republicans have been emphatic that those policies are the problem.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) said it was the Biden administration’s own policies that had triggered the rush to the border early on in 2021.

“If Vice President Harris wanted to find the ‘root causes’ of our Southwest border crisis, it would require looking in the mirror. Her own administration’s reckless open-border policies and refusal to enforce our nation’s laws have empowered cartels to take an unprecedented number of our sons’ and daughters’ lives with fentanyl,” Green said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.

Yet what should the country make of not just Administration policy but the officials who implement that policy, when it results in children effectively being turned into slaves?

At what point do we declare such policies and practices to be not merely illegal (which they are) but also immoral and absolutely unacceptable in the Free Society the United States prides itself on being, deservedly or not?

These are among the questions that arise from a Kamala Harris bid for the Oval Office.

As Vice President, she is merely, like Alejandro Mayorkas, a means for Biden’s political ends. As border czar, she is merely tasked with carrying out Administration policy. Ultimate responsibility for that policy must fall on the President himself, as it is the President alone which the Constitution charges with the duty of faithfully executing this nation’s laws.

Should Kamala Harris step into the top spot on the ticket, however, she would have to not only defend Joe Biden’s policies but her handling of them. She would have to explain away not just the massive numbers of migrants flowing to and across the southern border every year, but the Administration policies that have released many of those into the interior of the country.

She would have to explain why the Administration sent at least 85,000 children into slavery.

These are but a few of the questions a candidate Kamala Harris would have to answer. These are but a few of the questions the Republicans and Donald Trump would unquestionably use to generate soundbite of embarrassing soundbite of Kamala Harris trying desperately to avoid answering.

Call it a hunch, but I suspect the Democrats have figured out that they do not want Kamala Harris having to answer questions. If so, that would be the one thing in this dumpster fire of a 2024 Presidential election cycle the Democrats managed to get right.