Harris Is Smart to Say She’d Tap a Republican for Her Cabinet
I would have been apoplectic if Biden had done that, but times have changed.
“YES, I WOULD,” KAMALA HARRIS TOLD CNN, without hesitation, when asked last week if she’d name a Republican to her Cabinet. Why? She said she values diverse opinions, building consensus, and finding “a common place of understanding” in order to solve problems.
“I think it’s important to have people at the table when some of the most important decisions are being made that have different views, different experiences. And I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my Cabinet who is a Republican,” said the vice president and Democratic presidential nominee.
That’s smart, I thought. Then I suddenly remembered a biting column I’d written in December 2020 arguing that President-elect Joe Biden should “just say no” to having a Republican cabinet secretary. “Most of the party is in thrall to President Donald Trump or pretending to be, meaning most of the party is disqualified” from serving in a Biden cabinet, I wrote then.
A lot has changed since that angry, adamant piece published on the final day of that fateful year.
We’d been through the conservative hijacking of the Supreme Court, from the eleven-month GOP roadblock against Merrick Garland in 2016 to the thirty-day rush to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed a week before the 2020 election that Trump lost. We’d seen Trump sabotaging the transition to Biden, threatening national security and the COVID vaccine rollout; his dishonest insistence that he’d won the election; his many failed efforts to prove fraud and “find” votes to bolster his Big Lie; and his calls to supporters to descend on Washington for a “big protest” on January 6th. “Will be wild,” he wrote.
Then, in the days after that column was published, came the deadly January 6th Capitol attack. And Trump’s announcement that he’d boycott Biden’s inauguration (the first living president in over one hundred fifty years who declined to bless the transfer of power). He was impeached, again. Since then, he has been criminally indicted, four times, and convicted once—so far. And he wants to be president. Again.
Trump, his cronies, and his party of invertebrate suckups launched an era of political violence and threats, along with an “I really don’t care. Do u?” attitude toward blue states.
It almost goes without saying, but Trump did not include any Democrats in his cabinet.
All of this was especially infuriating coming after President Barack Obama’s notable efforts to reach across the aisle. He started by nominating an unprecedented three Republicans to his cabinet. One, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, was a holdover. Another, Commerce Secretary-designate Judd Gregg, then a New Hampshire senator, withdrew after nine days.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, the third Republican, did try to function as an envoy on some projects. Yet GOP obstruction during the Obama years was massive and historic, and not just on Garland’s Supreme Court nomination. Republicans were a wall of opposition to the Affordable Care Act, despite extensive negotiations and the conservative pillars of the law—private insurance and personal responsibility. The GOP-run House later killed an ambitious, bipartisan Senate immigration reform bill.
Republicans were waiting for their big chance to prevail in what they and most of their base see as a zero-sum political game: the next GOP president. But that didn’t work out as planned. Trump’s repeated promises to repeal and replace the ACA, fix the immigration system and build, build, build—as befits a boastful developer—devolved into failure, racism, and, in the case of his fruitless “infrastructure weeks,” into farce.
Biden, taking over amid Trump’s hostility, lies and sabotage, did not put a Republican in his cabinet. And it didn’t matter. He signed many bipartisan laws addressing problems you’d think both parties would want to solve. There were bipartisan bills to upgrade infrastructure, strengthen the U.S. Postal Service, repair the antiquated Electoral Count Act, support Ukraine after Russia’s invasion, and take on China by jumpstarting semiconductor chip production at home. There was also this year’s ambitious bipartisan border bill that Trump told his congressional minions to tank in order to boost his own White House odds. Biden would have signed it, and Harris says she would, too.
This wave of bipartisanship under Biden’s leadership materialized only after the GOP had shunned Obama’s repeated attempts at compromise and progress, and Trump had shown himself to be not just largely ineffectual and but also uniquely terrible at the art of the deal. A subset of Republicans inclined to address global threats, border challenges, and practical constituent needs finally decided to come to the table, and they found in Biden a willing and experienced negotiating partner. Harris has watched all this unfold at close range, and clearly is adopting it as a model for campaigning and governing.
Ever since her first full-scale rally last month as the Democrats’ insta-nominee, Harris has framed the race as the prosecutor vs. the felon. There is an urgency for her to defeat Trump and see him depart electoral politics forever. That may be part of why Harris was so quick to promise a Republican in the cabinet. It’s a reassuring move for people who don’t know much about her or who may be uncertain about voting for any Democrat.
When Biden took office, that particular kind of inclusiveness would have seemed like a reward for the sins of a party following its outlaw leader. The timing was all wrong. Now it feels appropriate and realistic. The Democratic National Convention alone showcased several Republicans who, despite the inevitable MAGA blowback, might be open to jobs in a Harris-Walz administration—among them John Giles, the mayor of Mesa, Arizona, and Olivia Troye, the homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Mike Pence during the Trump administration.
Faced with intractable Republican determination to thwart him, Obama’s presidency never lived up to the promise of his soaring 2004 speech about a country that’s not divided between black and white people or blue and red states: “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America.” Biden, who lived through those disappointments as Obama’s vice president, has tried again and met with more success. He’s worked across the aisle when possible, and his constructive civility has been a balm for the country.
That’s his legacy to us and to his own vice president. And Harris shows every sign that she gets it and plans to carry it forward.
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