How Biden Set Harris Up to Fail

The commentariat on the left is to basically try to disappear the reality of Harris's involvement in the border and make it appear as if the relative stability at the border, as compared with the first three and a half years of the Biden ministry or the first three years of the Biden administration, all the border's fine. See, Biden got it all under control after making it out of control as soon as he came into office. So Harris, no, Harris was doing fine. She was never the borders are.

And we had this silly fight last week for about three or four days where everyone was peeing their pants over the notion of whether or not Kamala Harris was the borders Zar, which is such as she was never the borders Zar, and you had these outlets trianngrily insisting that she was never the borders are in spite of the fact that they had written articles calling her the

border Zar. And it's such a silly thing to argue about because clearly President Biden designated that he was going to put her in charge of a lot of stuff relating to the immigration problem that was emerging in the first year of his presidency. And czar is not within

American government some formal title. It is an informal moniker that the press puts on a person when they've been designated in some way to be the point person, usually for a presidential administration to tackle problem X, Y or Z. So was she formally appointed the czar? No, there's no formal appointment process for someone to be quote the borders are. But President Biden designated that he was going to make Kamala Harris ort of this point person for this and

it's that designation that I want to talk about. I read this fascinating piece from National Review. You can read it at my Twitter account Twitter dot com slash Fresno Johnny at Fresno Johnny. It's written by Noah Rothman. It's really interesting the ways in which Biden clearly did not like Harris. And it's been my thesis all along. Biden never wanted to pick Kamala Harris as his vice president.

He was forced to do so because Democrats felt pressure to have their ticket include someone who wasn't an old white guy, and because the donors liked Harris. Harris comes out of California, she comes out of northern California. She comes out of the Willie Brown magic circle of donors. She was connected with Silicon Valley people. Donors loved Kamala Harris, and they clearly foisted her upon Joe Biden. Biden had no reason to like Harris. They had never worked together

their time in government, never overlapped. Biden leaves the vice presidency when she starts in the US Senate, so they have no history of working together in the Obama administration, in the Senate, anywhere. And in fact, Harris tried in a ham fisted way to call Joe Biden a racist to his face during the debate, which apparently is something that Jill Biden seems like a woman who holds a grudge,

never forgot, and never liked Harris. So what seems to have happened is that Biden gets saddled with Harris drags her across the finish line to win the election, and then he proceeds to give her sort of ownership and responsibility for problems he knows are not solvable, including the border that basically Biden so little regarded her and so disdained her, so disdained her ability or lack of ability as a politician and as an executive, that he just

sort of dumped several of his problems into her portfolio of stuff she worked on, and basically things that he knew were not really solvable, he would sort of assign to her so that she would take the blame and look like an idiot. So here's the piece. Harris's record is a story both of incompetence and of how little faith her own allies have in her political acumen and

capabilities as an executive. Since Joe Biden announced his intention to withdraw from American public life at the end of his term, the Trump campaign and its Republican allies have focused on their new opponents subpar performance handling border security. The GOP strategy makes sense for all the media's efforts to revise or even erase history. Harris was in function, if not title, although even that, like title, no one gets formally designated with this title in function, if not title,

was the Biden administration's Borders Zar. And yet the Republican Party's approach to this messaging campaign has so far been to frame Harris as a fully empowered functionary who nevertheless bungled her charge. In reality, the Biden administration set Harris up to fail as a way of providing the president

cover for his own dismal mishandling of the border. It was only two months after Biden's inauguration, with all Trump's COVID era restrictions still in place, that encounters between migrants and patrol agents exploded at the US Mexico border, soon to eclipse even pre pandemic highs. That same month, the President tapped his vice president not to bring the crisis under control, but to take the blame for it. So here's the critical part. Harris was not empowered to oversee

the administration's policing efforts on the border. So these are all the things that Biden didn't actually task Harris with. She wasn't allowed to oversee policing efforts. She wasn't allowed to spearhead negotiations on Capitol Hill for Congress to pass new laws regulating asylum. She wasn't allowed to negotiate deportation with countries beyond Mexico's borders from which most of the migrants were coming. So again a lot of this at that time, it was not Mexican migration. It was coming

from Central American countries south of Mexico. She was charged. Here's the actual tasks she was given. She was charged with, quote, talking to the leaders of Mexico and the nations that make up Central America's northern triangle to address quote the root causes of migration, gang violence, and trafficking and cartels, as the president said at the time, but also natural

disasters hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes. Rothman, in his piece writes, if the vice president had the power to mitigate phenomena like that, she'd be overqualified to merely preside over the Senate. In fact, as he writes, Harris wasn't granted any power at all, and she treated the role with which she'd been saddled like the burden that it was. Within weeks, her conspicuous failure to even visit the border she'd been tasked overseas became a political liability, won her lack of

political talent only made worse. But within a few months of her accession to the role, Harris started producing the only results she could. She got a commitment from twelve private companies to quote invest in Central America. She was able to deploy us A USA disaster team to provide food assistance and poverty reduction, and she got three hundred million dollars in humanitarian assistance. All this supposedly to mitigate

the push factors driving migrants north. Its effects were obviously negligible. The initiative's failure came at no surprise to Kamala Harris or her staff, so by twenty twenty one, Harris herself was leaking to reporters about what a BS situation she had been set up for. Harris's aids is Rothman writing here, Harris's aids were telling reporters that they had begun to panic over the torment to which Biden had consigned them.

As CNN reported at the time, her assignment was being mischaracterized and could be politically damaging if she were linked to the border, as indeed is happening right now, indeed potential potentially opening her up to criticism for the handling of the seemingly intractable problem was why Harris was tapped to be the face of the administration's failures on the border in the first place. So Biden was deliberately just dumping his problems into Harris's lap so that she could

be the fall gal, not the fall guy. The fall gal the President's staff, Rothman continues, never missed an opportunity to undermine Harris's conduct in her new role, promulgating the subtle implication that the horrors at the border were an outgrowth outgrowth of her mismanagement of the crisis. The exercise in misdirection was so effective for the Biden administration that it went back to the same well on several subsequent occasions.

Harris was soon given the task of combating state level Republican efforts to reform voting systems, over which she had zero authority. The White House dispatched her to Europe to stop Russia from invading Ukraine, three days before Russian forces cascaded over the Ukrainian border, all the while White House staff scoffed at her failures in on background conversations with

the press. Her portfolio is trash. Harris ally Bakari sellers complain in October of twenty twenty one, those sentiments were likely reflective of Harris's own consternation. Maybe I don't say no enough, she half joked in an interview with b

Et that year. But the reported tensions between Harris's office in Biden's staff, and the lingering hostility toward Harris nursed by Jill Biden, who was said to have not forgiven the Vice president for sandbagging her husband in the Democratic Party's twenty nineteen primary debates, are indicative of why she was treated like a receptacle into which the most thankless

and insurmountable tasks were dumped. And beyond that, there was also constant leaking from the Biden camp that Harris was unelectable. The president's staffers routinely retailed the notion that Harris was unelectable to the presidency, in part because of how poorly she managed the roles with which they had burdened her. Engineering This self fulfilling prophecy served President Biden's purpose at the time, which was to neutralize his most viable Democratic rival.

Isn't that amazing that Biden just viewed Harris as his chief rival the chief person he had to be afraid of unseating him for twenty twenty four, and so he was actively undermining her the whole time politically, and his staff was actively undermining her the whole time politically and dumping all of his problem, all of his failures, just getting dumped into her lap. So it is a thing of like I think in general, Harris Harris has to

take responsibility for the failures of the Biden administration. If she thought the Biden administration were such a sinking ship, then she either needed to make her objection to things known or resign so by which she never did. So I think any vice president has to take some of the crap for the failures of the administration she serves it. But I do think it's really interesting how, in fact, she wasn't really very empowered when it came to the border,

and that was by design. It was Biden deliberately trying to set her up to look terrible, to take the fall for him, and to damage her politically, because Biden knew that once twenty twenty four came around and he was eighty one years old, people would be people would have the knives out for him. So obviously his effort to do that it didn't quite work. When we return the silliness in some ways of blaming Harris for Biden's problems, at least from a governmental perspective. That's next on the

John Girardi Show. I thought this at the time when Republicans were pushing for the impeachment of Alexandro Majorcis, and I think this has to relate to Harris's failures at

the border. And we're talking about this really interesting piece from National Review by Noah Rothman where he's detailing how, yeah, it's not like Harris covered herself in glory with the border, but it's actually kind of a more rather than just a story of Harris being incompetent, it's really actually this story of Biden deliberately dumping all of his problems, his administration's most intractable failures, dumping them into Harris's lap, like

sort of publicly saying that she's going to be the point person for X, Y or Z, but not actually giving her the authority to do anything about it and so, and thus putting these unsolvable problems into her purviews so that she takes the fall for it, and she looks bad. Why Because Biden hated Harris's guts and he saw her as a threat to himself politically, which it turned out she was, and so he would dump all of his

problems on her, including the border. And I sort of thought this at the time with my orkus, like why are the Republicans bothering and peaching Mayorcis? Is only one person in the executive branch has ultimately executive authority, the President. The executive power of the United States law enforcement power in the United States government is vested in Article two

of the Constitution in one person, the President. All of the inferior officers of the United States, all the inferior officials who exercise some level of executive power, they are exercising the President's delegated power, and thus they have to do what they do in accordance with how the President wants it done. And that's why I always thought impeaching

Maorcus was silly, Like Majorcus wasn't doing anything. The Republicans wanted to impeach ma Orcis for the policies Maorcus was adopting for how to regulate immigration, for how to regulate the border. It wasn't for something like my orcus was accepting bribes. It was stuff where my orcus was obviously clearly carrying out the president's wishes. So if all my orcus is doing is carrying out the president's wishes, Okay,

I get being upset with my Orcus. I get maybe the argument that my orcus is doing things that are contrary to law, or that they are lawless, or that he's violating his oath of office. But ultimately the bigger fish here is Biden. Why not impeach Biden over it? If you're gonna impeach anybody at all, which maybe is just a fool's Errand in general, impeach Biden, not my Orcus, or my Orcus is just doing his job. He's just doing what he's told. He is carrying out the executive

authority of the United States' wishes. And that executive authority was Joe Biden. So it is a thing of like, yeah, Harris is a failure in this regard, in that regard, in this regard, in that regard, but all the authority that Harris had was delegated. She would have no authority unless it came to her from above to if I may rip off the words of Christ to paunch the pilot.

All of the vice president's authority other than breaking ties in the Senate, comes to her from the president, like she only has jobs within the executive branch insofar as the president wants to give her a job. And that's kind of the interesting slash weird thing about the vice presidency is that, frankly, it's kind of useless for governance. I mean, you can get a vice president who is super competent and you want to have help you with all kinds of things and manage all kinds of stuff.

Or you can pick, you know, a total lummocks or I don't know, you can pick a total doorknob who just sits around and does nothing and helps you win a swing state. And honestly, I think getting a dufist who just helps you win a swing state at the end of the day might be more useful because you can just have other advisors advise you. You can have other delegated people do the kinds of delegated things you would have the vice president do. The vice president has no

authority on his or her own. And I think that's the fascinating thing about Harris is that most of the things that I mean, Look, you're the vice president. You deserve to take crap for the failures of the administration you serve under. And Harris should take some blame for the crisis at the border, for this, for that the other thing. If Harris was truly thought that the Biden administration was doing stuff wrong and was not empowering her appropriately,

then she should have piped up about it. But she never did so. I think she hasked to take the crap for the failures of the Biden administration. But it is interesting how Biden was really deliberately setting her up to fail because of how much he seemingly loathed and disdained her. When we return the bogus Supreme Court quote reform rules that Biden is pushing now and Harris is also embracing now. That is next on the John Girardi Show.

I've been talking the last several years about the ridiculous and I'm hardly some uniquely insightful commentator or observer of these things. By the way, a lot of smart lawyer commentators have been seeing this same thing happening and predicting

what's coming down the pike. The constant barrage to create a sort of fog of news, the constant barrage of stories around individual members of the Supreme Court, and all concerned all the conservatives, none of the liberals have ever done anything that scans in spite of let's bring up lots of examples of liberal justices doing all these same things. Story after story after story after story over the last three years have detailed ways allegedly in which conservative justices

on the Supreme Court engaged in alleged ethical improprieties. Clarence Thomas was friends with this billionaire and took a bunch of flights on his private jet. Chief Justice Roberts's wife is a high powered attorney. She's kind of like an attorney headhunter who helps big time law firms recruit kind of partner level attorneys to move laterally to to new firms, and she gets compensated very handsomely for that. Not exactly a surprising thing that a Supreme Court justice is married

to a lawyer. That's happened many times before. Ruth Bader Ginsberg's husband was a very high powered tax attorney in DC. Amy Cony Barrett's husband was I think a former federal prosecutor, and I think now he's got a practice in d C. So John Roberts's wife is a very successful attorney as well, but both this raises questions about propriet she trading in

on her husband's name inappropriately. Forever all the BS stories about sam Alito, which, by the way, like the story all we've discussed sam Alito's wife was flying an upside down American. We know all about all the different flags that the Alito family has flown outside their home, but we only just learned a week or two ago that the Biden administration hasn't had a cabinet meeting since before

the Israel war started in October of last year. By the way, have you noticed no stories anymore, no leaks, no stories anything about Biden being seen Isle anymore. After two solid weeks of the press dumping all their notebooks out, every story they had collected over the last three years about how obviously senile Biden was book the vault, now

all of a sudden, we're silent. Anyway, So their story after story after story about the Supreme Court justice, and it's always the conservative justices being in some way corrupt, violating ethics rules, not reporting gifts they received and everything the Court was doing was in accordance with sort of the ethical standards that the Court sort of sets for themselves.

And why does the Court set ethical standards for itself. Well, lower courts abide by different kinds of ethics rules set for them, but the Supreme Court is a kind of coequal branch of government to the executive branch and the

legislative branch. And basically, excuse me, Basically, the Supreme Court has sort of taken the posture of no, we can't have the legislative branch mandating our terms of conduct for us anymore so than we should be able to mandate the terms of conduct for the executive branch or for the legislative branch for how they do their jobs. We're a co equal branch of government, so we'll have a body of ethics rules, but it's our own body of rules that we set for ourselves as a co equals

branch of government. And that's just the way it'll be, much like Congress sets up Congress has rules and procedures for kicking someone out of Congress for misconduct. That's how we're going to run this. That Congress doesn't tell us

what to do. So now beyond that, beyond this ethics thing where basically they've taken a bunch of non stories and they've been able to gin up enough non stories over the course of the last year that it creates what I call the fog of news, where it doesn't matter that the twenty stories or whatever it is, that all twenty of them have been ludicrously you know, ludicrous reaches to try to somehow say that conservative justices are

corrupt when really they aren't. There's nothing there. It doesn't matter that none of the twenty stories work, the fact that there have been so many story stories of alleged corruption by conservative justices on the court and noticed that oh, no liberal justice has ever done this, and a lot of a lot of the stuff they're criticizing people for it's stuff that the liberal justices did too. Oh, Clarence Thomas accepted free flights when he was asked to go

speak at you know, such and such. Yeah, Ruth Bader Ginsberg received free flights when she went and spoke over here. Sonya sodomy Are received free this when she went to speak over there. Elena Kagan, like, it's a lot of it is stuff that the liberal justices have also done, but it's not an ethical issue when Justice Bryer did it, or when Justice Ginsburg did it, or when Justice sodomy

or does it. They even tried to make a story out of Neil Gorsich, like he had a home in Colorado and he was selling it and somehow this was an ethics file. Almos another lawyer in Colorado, but some Democrat lawyer in Colorado and courses was like, yeah, I sold my house. I don't know how that can be an I made money off the sale of my house. Okay,

that's not an ethics violation to sell your house. Now, because they have this fog of news, as we call it, they deliberately build up these phony, baloney stories in order to justify proposals to in some way alter the makeup of the Supreme Court and thereby get more liberal results, because that's what they want. You have to understand how fundamentally liberals think that the universe is not right, that the universe is in fundamental disorder because the Supreme Court

is not controlled by liberals. They have controlled the Supreme Court fundamentally. They have controlled the Supreme Court since nineteen thirty seven. It's been their court, and any political issue that they really cared about they could always count on the Court to bail them out. I mean, they managed to make abortion legal nationwide without us, without like a single Democratic vote on the subject, just a snap of

our fingers. In nineteen seventy three, we went from a country where most of the country outlawed abortion to every single state in the Union had legal abortion for all forty weeks of pregnancy for any reason. Snap of the fingers. Gay marriage becomes the law of the land. With a

snap of the fingers. This that the other liberals have fundamentally controlled the Supreme Court for all They fundamentally controlled it for almost ninety years, for over eighty years, and Ginsburg dying in September of twenty twenty and being replaced by Amy Cony Barrett, they think is the greatest disaster, the greater disaster than the Titanic, thinking it fundamentally puts the universe in disarray, and particularly rov Wade being overturned,

that they cannot tolerate it. So conservatives who tolerated this for almost ninety years and say, well, I guess we got to do the hard work of electing presidents and electing senators who believe in the more limited role for the courts and who will start the federalist society and

will the hard work of working within the system. So Conservatives like schmucks for eighty plus years kept their noses to the grindstone until eventually winning enough elections, getting enough presidents who are convinced of more limited role for the courts, and got enough senators elected that they could both nominate

and confirm less liberal justices to the Supreme Court. And now there is a six justice Republican majority, Republican appointee majority, and Liberals having been out of power on the Supreme Court for all of five minutes. Liberals are absolutely apoplectic about it. And so Biden and Harris are proposing one the idea of term limits for Supreme Court justices and

an ethics code. Now, the ethics code is problematic. It would be problematic for Congress to pass a law imposing an ethics code on the members of the Court again for these sort of separation of powers arguments. But the real thing, the thing that they really care about, the ethics thing is a side issue. They don't actually care about this ethics thing. They've made a big deal about alleged ethical violations in order to rationalize the thing they

really want, which is term limits. And they want term limits. Now. They never gave a crap about term limits for the last again, almost ninety years. Why well, because they owned the court for the last ninety years. They didn't want term limits. They wanted those old geezers, those old liberal geezers like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, hanging on for dear life to the bitter end. But now that they've got you know, they're staring down the barrel of Amy Cony. Barrett's going

to be on the Supreme Court for another thirty years. Now, they're playing a different tune. So here's the problem. Now, when we return, I'm going to talk about the constitutional problem. The constitutional problem is that Article thread of the Constitution guarantees lifetime appointments. When we return, we'll talk about the absurd way that they're going to try to say, oh, well, well, term limits for Supreme Court justices. You don't need to amend the Constitution to do it. That is next on

the John Gerardi Show. President Biden and Vice President Harris have introduced some proposals for quote reforming the Supreme Court, one of which is an ethics code for Supreme Court justice, a mandatory ethics code, as opposed to the Court imposed the Court imposed ethics code, which the Court has a self imposed ethics code for various kinds of separation of

powers reasons. But that's really a side show. The thing that actually the liberals care about because they cannot stand the disorder in the universe of Republican appointees being in control of the Supreme Court for the first time, and well more conservative leaning justices anyway, being in control of the Supreme Court for the first time in eighty plus years.

The thing they really care about is term limits. Now, at first, in that you might recall in the twenty twenty campaign you had liberals saying we should we should pack the court, we should increase the number of justices so that Biden can appoint all the replacements. And I think Democrats realize that's a very unpopular proposal. No one was going to buy that, so they decided, well, what sounds a lot more moderate than that, term limits. Term limits.

There you go. Here's the problem with term limits. Article three of the Constitution says that the justices of the Supreme Court or of any inferior courts established by Congress, shall serve in good behavior. In good behavior is a term of art, and it basically means for life. It's not limited by a term of office. You're just allowed to serve as long as you want. It's a lifetime appointment. That's how just judge ships, including being on the Supreme

Court have been understood. Now. The idea that Biden cooked up, and it sounds like it was Joe Biden called his old buddy Larry Tribe. Lawrence Tribe was a retired law professor at Harvard. Lawrence Tribe was kind of like the peat best of liberal Supreme Court. Justice Pete Best was the fifth Beadle, you know, the guy who almost made it as a member of the Beatles but didn't quite so. Lawrence Tribe was the would have could have should a

Liberal candidate for the Court. Everyone sort of thought that maybe Bill Clinton would nominate him to the Supreme Court, or maybe Barack Obama would nominate him to the Supreme Court, and it just never quite worked out, never quite between. Well, Clinton needed to appoint a woman this time, and Obama was appointing this person just didn't didn't work out for Larry Tribe. So he's a law professor at Harvard and he's,

you know, in his old age. He calls up, Biden calls him up, a couple old geezers yacting on the phone, and Tribe and Biden sort of cook up this idea. Well, okay, yeah, the Constitution says in good behavior, so that's like a lifetime appointment. So you know, we can't kind of you know, if you want to change the Constitution, obviously you can't do that with just a normal law passed by Congress.

So maybe what we should do then is say, well, no, no, no, no, no. They still get a lifetime appointment, but basically they can only serve on the Supreme Court for this many years and then when they're done with that term, they get to be the rest of their life appointment on one of the lower courts. So maybe maybe you get kicked down to, you know, whatever circuit you happen to live in.

So if you're from California, you're a point nominated the Supreme Court, you serve there for all these years, when you're done with your Supreme Court term, to go be a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court. Of appeals, which is bs that doesn't work. It's clearly the judgeship that's protected for good behavior by the Constitution is that judgeship. It's not the idea of you can just sort of swap people around from this judge ship to an inferior

judge ship. And that is a thing that the Constitution is very conscious of, is people getting jobs and getting compensated for jobs, and the law is very conscious of if you get a job taken from you, that can create a cause of action for you to sue if that compensation, if that work is taken if that office was taken from you wrongly, or was taken from you unlawfully, Like people being appointed to things and then having that

appointment taken away from them. That's a big act. So the idea that, to me, it just seems preposterous to me that the framers of the Constitution would say, oh, judges can keep their judge ship either on the Supreme Court or on one of the inferior courts in good behavior, but can have a higher judge ship taken from them based on an arbitrary deadline made up by Congress, some arbitrary term made up by Congress and given a worse job,

a lower status job, which is what the circuit. It's undeniable. The Supreme Court is supreme. Okay, It's a more important job than being on the ninth Circuit or the DC Circuit or the eighth Circuit, of the first Circuit, whatever. It's undeniably a more important job. It's the court you appeal up to. So these proposals from Biden and Harris, I think are meant to excite the ultraliberals in the party,

but I don't think they could actually work. I think they would face real constitutional problems because you'd have to amend the Constitution. You can't amend the Constitution with a simple bill. That'll do it for the John Girody Show. See you next time on Power Talk.