Sen. JD Vance, the Republican Party’s vice presidential nominee, mocked the idea this week that Vice President Kamala Harris “wants to build the border wall.” Hours later, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham appeared on Fox News and told viewers, “Graham: Do you really believe she’s going to build a wall? That’s just bulls—.”
As for what prompted the partisan pushback, it apparently stems from a report Axios published. The headline read, “Harris flip-flops on building the border wall,” and the article began:
If she’s elected president, Kamala Harris pledges to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the wall along the southern border — a project she once opposed and called “un-American” during the Trump administration. It’s the latest example of Harris flip-flopping….
A typical person reading this might believe that the Democratic presidential hopeful recently endorsed investing in a border wall, but that’s not quite what happened.
Let’s take a brief stroll down memory lane.
As regular readers might recall, it was last fall when congressional Republicans said they were so desperate to deal with U.S./Mexico border policies that they took a radical step: GOP officials said that unless Democrats agreed to a series of conservative reforms, Republicans were prepared to cut off military aid to Ukraine and let Russia take part of Eastern Europe by force.
Democrats, left with little choice, agreed to pay the GOP’s ransom and endorsed a conservative, bipartisan compromise. At that point, Republicans killed the compromise plan they’d demanded — largely because Donald Trump told them to.
Making matters worse, the calculus was electoral, not substantive: The former president didn’t want Congress to hand President Joe Biden an election-year victory on one of the party’s top priorities. Republicans followed Trump’s lead and concluded that they’d rather have a campaign issue than a solution.
What does this have to do with allegations of Harris “flip-flopping”? The bipartisan compromise, which featured concessions from both parties, included some wall funding in the hopes of generating GOP support. It was a relatively modest sum — $650 million, roughly 3% of what the Trump administration sought in 2018 — and the funding wasn’t even new. (As Team Harris reminded Axios, the provision “just extended the timeline to spend funds that had been appropriated during Trump’s last year as president.”) The vice president has never been a wall advocate — in fact, she’s been a fierce critic of Trump’s plan — but she endorsed the Senate agreement in the hopes of getting something done on the issue. Six months after Republicans killed the deal they requested, using Harris’ convention speech as a news hook, Axios summarized this in bullet-point form, at which point the right effectively declared, “A ha!” As lines of attack go, this is weak tea. If the Democratic nominee were to actually endorse the merits of a border wall, that would be a dramatic reversal worthy of attention. But her willingness to back a bipartisan compromise — which included provisions she and her party would not support on their own — does not a “flip-flop” make.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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