Kamala Harris is in real trouble. According to media reports, Harris continues to lose staff with the departure of yet another high-ranking member of her team.
Kate Childs Graham, Harris’ chief speechwriter, is leaving the vice president’s office at the end of the month, sources told Fox News.
A White House official told Fox News, “Kate is leaving the office, but not the family”.
This is far from the first resignation for the Kamala’s team. The office has seen a virtual exodus over the course of her first year in office as staffers complain about their workplace morale.
Harris’ communications director Ashley Etienne resigned in November to “pursue other opportunities”. That came after reports of exasperation between Harris’ office and Biden’s amid lagging approval ratings for Harris.
Shortly after Etienne’s departure, Symone Sanders announced she would be departing at the end of the year. Harris’ office said Sanders, a senior adviser and her chief spokesperson, “will be missed”.
Meanwhile, there is growing demand within the Democratic Party to immediately replace Kamala Harris with a someone real efficient. Few weeks ago, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggested that Joe Biden replace Kamala Harris with Cheney, which generated significant mockery on social media. Cheney is the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and is vice chair of the House select committee that’s investigating the Capitol riot.
Cheney is a bitter foe of former President Donald Trump, who says he may run again in 2024.
“We’ve got to get rid of the weak congresspeople, the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys”, Trump said in a speech shortly before the riot on January 6, 2021.
Trump vetoed a US$740 billion defense bill in his final month as president after Cheney attached restrictions to removing troops from Afghanistan, Germany and South Korea.
A December poll by Politico and Morning Consult found Harris would have the backing of 31 percent of Democratic primary voters, trailed by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg with 11 percent and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) with 8 percent. A poll released in November by The Hill and HarrisX found Harris with just 13 percent support, followed by former first lady Michelle Obama at 10 percent. All other candidates were below 5 percent in that poll.
Harris’ relatively low approval rating — she’s averaging just 39.1 percent versus 41.8 percent for Biden — also spurred chatter this month about a possible 2024 bid by Hillary Clinton, the unsuccessful 2016 Democratic nominee.
Joe Biden promised last week to nominate the first black woman to the Supreme Court. “Long overdue”, he says.
When it comes to elevating African-American females to high office, Biden has form. He chose Kamala Harris, remember, to be the first female vice president of color.
But what if Biden elected to choose the same woman — namely, Vice President Kamala Harris — for the Supreme Court? Wouldn’t that be so unimaginative and tokenistic as to be quite racist? Even a leader as error-prone as Biden wouldn’t do that, would he?
Yet in Washington, there are whispers of a cunning plan to shunt Kamala on to the Supreme Court in order to bring in a more popular vice president, someone who might take over from an eighty-two-year-old Biden in 2024 and win the next presidential election.
It sounds too mad to be possible. Yet dementedness is a theme of the Biden-Harris administration. This week, after eighty-three-year-old Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced he would stand down, the “Kamala for Justice” rumors have spread more wildly. She has a legal background, of course, having served as attorney general of California before she became a senator.
On Wednesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki did little to dampen the speculation when she said: “The president has every intention, as he said before, of running for reelection and for running for reelection with Vice President Harris on the ticket”.
When political people say “every intention,” they often mean the opposite.
Harris, for her part, also rebutted the suggestion somewhat equivocally when asked in December if she aspired one day to sit on the Supreme Court.
“I like what I’m doing, the ability to travel around the country, to talk with folks, to push for policy, that has impact in a very direct way,” she said. Her recently resigned chief spokeswoman, Symone Sanders, dismissed the Supreme Court chatter on Twitter as “right-wing gossip with no basis in facts” — before adding “But that’s just my opinion. Idk”.
