DETROIT, Mich. — Swing states are in play, like the one from which I write this — and like Arizona, one of the many places that’ve struggled with accommodating illegal immigration in the Biden-Harris era.
And as battlegrounds hang in the balance, ever more important are questions about what the vice president has done to deal with the crisis at the line where Mexico meets America — even as a top Dem on the issue tries to gaslight The Post.
It’s been close to a week since Democrats decided, after more than three years of letting it pass, that Kamala Harris is not the border czar after all.
Despite Dems’ claims, Republicans aren’t the only ones who’ve referred to her with that title for years — Axios back in April 2021 noted Harris was “appointed by Biden as border czar.”
It didn’t matter much when she was veep, but as she’s now effectively co-president with Joe Biden, it suddenly matters a great deal.
And in a game of high-stakes semantics, Dems insist the phrase itself is verboten.
No one has been more aggressive than former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on this late-in-the-game fact checking.
“She assumed the role that Vice President Biden had during the Obama administration, which is diplomacy with Central America. That was a role he had. He gave it to her. She is not the border czar,” Johnson said authoritatively on “Fox and Friends” last week.
When Johnson addressed a National Press Foundation Election Security Fellowship event Sunday night in Detroit, it had to be asked: Why didn’t he and other Dems clear the VP’s name years ago rather than scapegoat her?
“I wasn’t confronted with the title when I was in an interview on ‘Fox & Friends’ until last week,” Johnson told The Post. “I’m sure the phrase ‘border czar’ has appeared across news organizations only since she became the presidential nominee for the Democratic Party. And so it just hasn’t been a top-of-mind issue.”
How Johnson missed that nickname is a mystery indeed — as is why he claims just anti-Harris types use it.
“The term ‘border czar’ just got created, but it certainly didn’t get created by the Biden administration,” Johnson added. “Only the skeptics use that term to try to enlarge the responsibilities that she actually had.”
There’s an argument that ‘fill-in-the-blank czar’ is ultimately a term of art. Bill Bennett, the first Office of National Drug Control Policy director, was the drug czar some decades back, for example. It’s an inelegant shorthand for someone who is supposed to demonstrate absolute power in a given scenario but falls ignominiously short.
VP Harris, who gives speeches multiple times a week, has a penchant for finding a way to get topics where she wants them to be. She certainly had the opportunity to clarify at some point in the last three years that the buck doesn’t stop with her when it comes to the border crisis. But it wasn’t a priority of hers to offer a good-faith disclosure of her limited role and tell the American people who really should be blamed.
And it is the season of mea culpas and dramatic declarations. In a year Joe Biden actually stood down as a presidential candidate, is it really so far-fetched to expect Kamala Harris to explain why she shouldn’t be called the border czar? To explain what created the issues in the administration whose work she is to continue?
If she wants to win in the aforementioned Arizona, for instance, a state from which she’s considering elevating Sen. Mark Kelly to be her running mate, she’ll need to find a way to come clean.
As it is, the Trump campaign is defining the narrative, and even as it gets memory holed in certain outlets — with Axios itself alleging Harris “never actually had” the title — the border-czar trope is potent and unforgettable because it gets to the hypocrisy at the heart of how this administration handled illegal immigration — and how its apologists helped them.
