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When Vice President Kamala Harris arrives at the Capitol on Friday to swear-in the new class of Senators, many of the smiling politicians handing her their family Bibles will be the same ones who for months have been telling crowds that she was a threat to the American way of life. At campaign rallies, on social media, and in interviews, some spent months falsely claiming she wanted to ban Christmas from the calendar, bring dog meat to immigrants’ stoves, or rig the election by inviting undocumented immigrants to flood polling places and cast illegal ballots.
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Of the four Senators taking oaths on Friday who also spoke at the Republican convention in Milwaukee last year, three of them couldn’t be bothered to pronounce her name correctly when they took a moment to ridicule her.
It’s an inelegant reality that every Vice President faces in their role as the President of the Senate, one that is particularly raw for those like Harris, Al Gore, and Richard Nixon who lost their presidential bids but still had to return for a final few weeks of a grind at the Capitol. Former Senators all, they understood that the norms of the Upper Chamber could not be set aside to save their bruised ego, nor would these institutionalists ask to be spared. Standing there with folks who trashed them is just part of the gig. Or at least that’s what they have to tell themselves.
That doesn’t make it—or presiding over a Senate on Jan. 6 as it certifies their opponents’ win in the Electoral College—any easier. Just ask former Vice Presidents Mike Pence, Joe Biden, and Dan Quayle how much they enjoyed helping set their political foes on the final glidepath toward replacing them.
For Harris, who inherited the Democratic nomination late in the calendar, the day cannot be one of ease. Although she has put forward a strong face in the wake of her convincing defeat and has told her supporters and aides that pity parties are not how they do things, the arrival in Washington this week of some of her fiercest—and most creative—critics, now imbued with more power, provides an added sting to the meteoric rise and shocking shortfall she endured over the last six months.
Take Sen.-elect Bernie Moreno of Ohio, who was born in Bogatá, Colombia and ran an auto empire in Cleveland before unseating Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown by tapping into voters’ anxieties over immigration in a former industrial powerhouse. Moreno not only helped spread the false allegations that residents of Springfield, Ohio, were eating dogs and cats, he claimed they were the byproduct of Harris’ role in giving temporary status to legal immigrants, and said Harris and fellow Democrats “have put the welfare of illegals ahead of our own citizens.” Meanwhile, his campaign inched very close to blaming Harris for a failed assassination attempt against Trump.
Sen.-elect Jim Banks of Indiana, campaigning for one of the safest seats in the country, stuck with the tried-and-true culture war fodder in saying Harris wanted her “war of Christmas.” Harris will swear in him too, along with Sen. Ted Cruz, who spent months saying Harris and her allies were coordinating asylum seekers to flood the country with future voters. (For the record: non-citizens cannot vote.) Cruz also said in September the Ukrainian president was using a trip to the United States to campaign as a Harris surrogate.
And Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who had eyed the top job in his chamber but did not get it, crassly assessed that Harris was ignoring his state’s post-hurricane recovery to chase photo-ops. “She doesn’t care enough about Florida to get her butt down here and say she’s going to make sure the federal government is a partner in what’s going on right now in our state,” Scott said. He also accused her of picking the policies she touted based on “racism.”
And as these newcomers and alumni alike take the oath on Friday, they’ll be repeating it from the woman who, at least until Election Day of last year, was considered the standard-bearer of a political party now looking for an identity and a future.
Political pros like Harris understand this is just the nature of the performative piece of doing the job. As a former career prosecutor, district attorney, state Attorney General, Senator, Vice President, and presidential nominee, she gets that the folks across the aisle will take every opportunity to amplify and even at times invent daylight between the two parties. She certainly has done it over her career, and there’s no indication that the 60-year-old trailblazer is done.
That doesn’t mean there is any of that joy heading from the Veep’s residence at the Naval Observatory to Capitol Hill as this week ends. Harris and Biden alike are packing up offices that will soon be held by their polar opposites. Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance—whose Senate seat from Ohio is still an open question that only Gov. Mike DeWine can answer—are about as unlikely a pair of heirs as can be expected. The Senate, too, is about to pivot not just from a Democratic majority to a Republican one, but a GOP-led chamber without former Leader Mitch McConnell’s iron hold over his caucus. That potential chaos in a chamber requiring 60 votes for almost every piece of consequential legislation may be the lone reason Harris can summon comfort as she readies for photo-ops with figures who spent months trashing her, weeks misrepresenting her updated policies, and for years to come will be casting votes in Washington while she plans her next moves.
So Harris will grip, grin, and grit on Friday, and for the next 17 days. Just don’t expect her to forget the litany of slights they hurled at her. Like all good pols at her level, Harris’ memory can be stubborn.
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