Kamala Harris: 'Border Czar' in All But Name

Let's get one thing straight. Kamala Harris was never named "border czar." That was a title given to her by critics and her allies in the media.

Liz Wolf of Reason.com explains this. "Border czar is not a formal title. It's what we, in American politics and media, call…the person in a presidential administration who runs point on immigration and the border. Which is, in part, what Harris was told to do."

The other part Harris was supposed to manage was the diplomatic efforts to keep migrants from leaving their countries and traveling to the United States.

The Washington Examiner reported after Biden announced Harris's border responsibilities, "Her focus will be on working with regional leaders on 'making it safer for people to stay at home to access asylum in the region to access legal pathways that the administration is working hard to stand up,' a separate official said."

How'd that work out for ya, Kammy?

It may be inaccurate to refer to Harris as a "border czar." It's entirely accurate to say that whatever her responsibilities regarding the border were, she bolluxed the whole thing up.

The left and Harris's defenders have latched on to the inaccurate identification of her title to claim any criticism of Harris about her job as...whatever her title was...is false and misleading. What made the defense so amusing was that many of the news outlets now criticizing Republicans for using the term "border czar" used it themselves at the time.

But now, "in the past few days, the Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the 'border czar' title—which she never actually had," reports Axios. At the end of the piece is an asterisk mentioning that Axios was among the publications using the "border czar" moniker in error. The fact-checkers quickly endorsed the new party line. The New York Times chimed in with its own corrective pinning blame for the "border czar" title on Republicans. Mother Jones called Harris serving as the administration's border czar a "myth." I mean, the experts even said she wasn't, so how could anyone possibly disagree?

They apologized for their misleading characterizations three years after the fact, so it's OK now. The media has a clean slate, all is forgiven, and this is the way to the memory hole.

Watch out. That first step is a doozy.

The left and their media allies just don't get it. Kamala Harris was an abject failure at whatever her job title was. We know this by Biden's own definition of her responsibilities.

Interestingly, the fact that Harris was tasked with addressing the root causes of the border crisis appears to be meant as an exculpatory fact, something the White House dreamed up to distance Harris from the mess at the border, when in reality, she's clearly failed to make any headway on the root causes issue. Regardless of what her role was—or what it is convenient to portray her role as—she doesn't appear to have been very good at it (something several swing state voters interviewed by MSNBC have tapped into).

I should mention that Biden gave a poisoned apple to Harris, who then pretended to eat it. The reason she went through the motions with as low a profile as possible is because she knew she was being set up for failure. She refused to be the administration's fall guy for the border crisis. That's why she only went to the border once. As far as addressing the "root causes" of the border crisis, she made a couple of trips to Central America but, otherwise, did very little to keep the migrants at home.

This is what Trump and the GOP should be focusing on. "Border Czar" is a convenient shorthand for Harris's and Biden's failures to protect the border. But Harris's real failure is that she had a ghost job given to her by the president that she tried to hide from. And whatever she ended up trying to accomplish, she failed miserably.