GOPers Can’t Stop Going After Harris’s Race and Gender

Plus: More unnecessary impeachment resolutions

Photo by Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

In a closed-door meeting Tuesday, House Republican leaders had a simple request for their colleagues: When attacking Kamala Harris, please, please focus on policy, not race or gender. 

As House Speaker Mike Johnson put it, the party’s line should be “politics and not personalities,” a phrase he used both in the meeting and in comments to reporters afterward.

Unfortunately, for many Republicans, this appears to be too big of an ask.

In the days since President Joe Biden bowed out of the race and endorsed Harris for the Democratic nomination, Republicans have scrambled to work out new lines of attack. Some have targeted Harris’s role in the administration’s seemingly flat-footed response to immigration and border security problems—a major swing-vote vulnerability for her—while others have highlighted the more liberal positions she held during her Senate career and brief 2020 presidential campaign. 

Those represent the high road. Many GOP lawmakers and conservative media personalities have instead opted for the low road by making race and gender the themes of their attacks. Republicans such as Johnson and NRCC Chairman Rich Hudson understand this could have a boomerang effect on the whole party’s political prospects, but their warnings don’t seem to be reaching the colleagues they most need to rein in.