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Working Together Hasn't Worked for Kamala Harris; The vice president is running out of time to cut Biden loose.Working Together Hasn't Worked for Kamala Harris; The vice president is running out of time to cut Biden loose. Wall Street Journal (Online); New York, N.Y. It's not easy being the vice president of the United States—especially when almost no one in Washington knows what the job of the vice president is. The latest in a series of Beltway media stories about the challenges encountered by Kamala Harris suggests that neither her staff nor the staff of a recent predecessor understand the duties and power of the office. Now Ms. Harris is running out of time to seize a historic opportunity. "The veep has cast more tie-breaking votes than all but two predecessors. It's starting to frustrate some staff," reports Politico's Eugene Daniels today. Mr. Daniels reports: In her 16 months as vice president, Harris has broken 23 ties in her official role as president of the Senate, according to the official Senate count. That puts her third of all-time, only trailing America's very first vice president, John Adams (29 votes), and its seventh, John C. Calhoun (31 votes). Last week alone, Harris cast six tie-breaking votes. Her current boss, Joe Biden, broke all of zero ties while serving for eight years as vice president under President Barack Obama. With a 50-50 Senate, the need for Harris to be on hand for possible votes has frustrated some aides who said she would much rather be traveling the country, touting the administration's accomplishments... Harris, those around her say, would prefer amplifying support for abortion rights, voting rights and other issues important to her and the administration. But tie votes need breaking, and she has that constitutional honor. Privately, Harris has lamented her inability to escape the D.C. bubble. This column applauds the vice president's healthy instinct to abandon the swamp, but also recognizes that she has a responsibility to fulfill. "Pretty amazing for an entire piece where Kamala Harris's circle complains about her having to do the only job that the Constitution explicitly assigns to her," Ben Jacobs tweets in response to the Politico story. Of course she also has to be prepared to exercise executive authority in the event the president is not able to fulfill his duties. But in the meantime her role is not to serve as the designated catcher of rhetorical javelins over Biden policy failures. Constitutionally she does not report to the president and cannot be fired by Mr. Biden. In January this column endorsed the New York Sun's proposal that Ms. Harris leave the White House, decamp to her stately office off the floor of the 50-50 Senate and exercise independent leadership in crafting bipartisan legislative compromise. Imagine the good she might have done if she had been pursuing this approach since the start of her term. In March of 2021 Ms. Harris broke a tie on a procedural vote enabling Mr. Biden's ironically titled American Rescue Plan to advance. Even many on the left now acknowledge the law's destructive impact. "Biden's American Rescue Plan worsened inflation. The question is how much," reads a Vox headline over a story from Andrew Prokop. He writes about the inflationary impact of recent federal stimulus plans: And the stimulus that most stands out is Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan — because it was enacted after more than $3 trillion had already been spent to stimulate the economy under Trump, with one big chunk of that being approved just three months prior. Mr. Prokop notes new research from several members of the staff of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Òscar Jordà, Celeste Liu, Fernanda Nechio and Fabián Rivera-Reyes report : Inflation rates in the United States and other developed economies have closely tracked each other historically. Problems with global supply chains and changes in spending patterns due to the COVID-19 pandemic have pushed up inflation worldwide. However, since the first half of 2021, U.S. inflation has increasingly outpaced inflation in other developed countries. Estimates suggest that fiscal support measures designed to counteract the severity of the pandemic's economic effect may have contributed to this divergence by raising inflation about 3 percentage points by the end of 2021. Ouch. The president's signature achievement bears much of the blame for current U.S. inflation. And the president cannot entirely evade responsibility even for the Covid spending that occurred before his term. That spending was intended to offset the economic damage of the lockdowns. The radical 2020 experiment to shut down much of society and use federal cash to simulate prosperity was conducted with the enthusiastic support of Mr. Biden. In fact he was so supportive of the concept that he served as a model shuttered citizen and campaigned for President from his basement. It's late but perhaps not too late for Ms. Harris to seize the moment, cut herself loose from a failing presidency, put aside her partisan and ideological instincts and become a unifying and powerful force in Washington. Unfortunately the town's experts still don't understand her constitutional function. Mr. Daniels writes in Politico: ...being at the Senate so frequently is, with some exceptions, not the best use of a vice president's time, said Joel K. Goldstein, a vice presidential historian who called it a "nuisance" for any veep. "When Vice President Harris votes, it's important to the administration. It means that whenever there's a tie, they win," he said. "But in terms of measuring her contributions, she's not going to be a historic figure based on what she does as president of the Senate." While having to stick around D.C. may limit any veep's ability to get out of town to represent the White House, former Gore chief of staff Jack Quinn said that comes with the territory. "There can be no doubt the benefits of being vice president far outweighs the inconvenience of having to break an occasional tie in the Senate," he said. Any time Harris is sent to the Hill, even when she's not needed for a vote, it serves as a reminder to Biden that she knows what her "No. 1 job is." "And it is having his back," he said. That's not her job, and in any case the loyalty doesn't seem to be mutual. This week the State Department, which does answer to the president, tweeted a comical video clip of Ms. Harris attempting to make a point while repeating again and again her intention to "work together" with allies. For much of her tenure, she's been criticized for not mounting a clear defense of a Biden immigration policy that defies coherent explanation. Ms. Harris should leave the White House and focus on working together with senators of both parties. *** James Freeman is the co-author of "The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival." |
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