All-American Flag Act

Debbie Smith Act of 2023

Improving Access to Our Courts Act

As Republicans rev up their anti-Kamala Harris campaign, they’re having a hard time finding a consistent line of attack.

In recent days, Republicans have slammed the vice president for everything from her handling of immigration and her past as a prosecutor to her “terrible,” “horrible” and “mean” demeanor. On Wednesday, Donald Trump called Harris a “radical, left lunatic,” then branded her “nasty” in a Fox News interview the following day — an echo of insults Trump leveled against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Trump’s allies, meanwhile, have argued she is actively engaged in a conspiracy to hide Biden’s apparent decline or that she’s just another Biden altogether. Some have engaged in explicitly racist and sexist attacks, calling her a “DEI hire” or bashing her for not having biological children. Others say she laughs too much. More criticized her for endorsing consumer policies such as bans on plastic straws and eating red meat. And none of her rivals seem willing to correctly pronounce her name.

“They are literally grasping at straws,” said Michael Brodkorb, a former deputy chair of the Minnesota Republican Party. “Republicans desperately wanted to run against Joe Biden. … The introduction of Harris into the race, I think, has upended their attacks and their strategies.”

The breadth and lack of cohesion in the Republican assault on Harris reflects the newness of her candidacy — but also the difficulty GOPers are having adjusting to a contender who cuts a different profile than the 81-year-old, white, male incumbent they’d been planning a run against for years.

On the day Biden bowed out and Harris announced her campaign, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley suggested on Fox News that the change would not alter Republicans’ broader messaging.

“We are not going to be changing our plans because President Trump is going to run his race, and whether it is Kamala Harris or anyone else, they are going to run on the exact same failed agenda that Joe Biden has been running over the last four years,” he said.

But once Harris got in, Republicans were all over the map. Just hours after she announced her candidacy, Trump’s super PAC released an ad attacking Harris, claiming she “covered up Joe’s obvious mental decline” and that she “knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it” herself. (The White House has disputed reports that aides insulated Biden to hide signs of decline.)

Then, the attacks pivoted to Harris’ identity.

A 2021 clip of Trump’s now-running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) calling Harris and other Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too” began recirculating on social media. (One of Harris’ two step-children, Ella Emhoff, responded Thursday on Instagram, writing: “How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like cole and I … I love my three parents.”)

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) both called Harris a “DEI hire” in interviews. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) said, “a lot of Democrats feel they have to stick with her because of her ethnic background.”

By Tuesday, House Republican leaders issued members of the caucus a warning in a closed-door meeting to focus on Harris’ record, not her race. The call came after Trump prompted a false birther conspiracy about Harris’ eligibility in 2020.

Other Republicans, avoiding issues of race and gender, have focused on defining Harris as an ultra-progressive politician from San Francisco who is “SOFT AS CHARMIN” on crime and other issues. In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas repeatedly called Harris a “San Francisco liberal,” Cotton continued, hitting Harris for her approach on crime, accusing her of opposing the death penalty, supporting rioters and freeing felons from prison when she was California’s attorney general.

That’s a shift in approach from Trump’s 2020 campaign, which pushed competing messages on Harris’ record on crime, simultaneously accusing her of being too tough and too lenient on prosecuting criminals.

“They’re road testing a lot of different messages, have not really narrowed down what resonates, what people care about,” said Jason Roe, a Republican strategist in the battleground state of Michigan. “She’s still pretty undefined, and I think there’s a whole lot of definition yet to be provided.”

He added: “Republicans are throwing everything to see what works,” and he suggested there will be more to come.

“We haven’t really gotten to her time as senator or attorney general or San Francisco D.A.,” Roe said, predicting “there’s going to be some good red meat in her record there.”

One thing Republicans have seized on nearly universally is Harris’ handling of immigration, after the first year of her vice presidency was dominated by an assignment she received from Biden to handle the root causes of migration to the United States from countries in Central America. The White House described Harris’ charge as a “diplomatic” one in a press conference Thursday — and not one for her to become the administration’s “border czar,” as many Republicans have labeled her.

But keeping a disciplined message against Harris on immigration has proven difficult for both Trump and his allies, too. The former president did not mention her handling of the border once during an interview with “Fox & Friends” on Monday, though he was quick to accuse her of wanting to “defund the police”; describe her as “terrible,” “horrible” and “mean”; and call her a “San Francisco radical.” Neither Biden's nor Harris’ campaign platform described support for defunding the police, though Harris has been in favor of broader criminal justice reform.

Trump then tried to flip the emerging “prosecutor-criminal” contrast sought by Harris, arguing that she is too lenient on some but harsh on punishing her political enemies.

“They say, ‘I'm a prosecutor. He is a criminal.’ They are the ones. Every case is started by them, and I'm winning the cases,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends.”

Despite claiming an intent to focus on policy rather than personality, a memo released by the National Republican Senatorial Committee on Monday includes a category about Harris simply labeled “weird.” The NRSC memo criticizes Harris for “laughing at inappropriate moments,” loving Venn diagrams and electric school buses, and endorsing consumer policies such as bans on plastic straws and eating red meat.

The roots of some of these attacks — including the use of Harris’ laugh in campaign ads — have been repurposed by Democrats designed to make her seem relatable to a mass audience. The Trump campaign has even tried to capitalize off some of the Charli XCX and coconut-themed videos that have made Harris into a viral meme.

At the same time that the Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania was praised for an ad tying his opponent to Harris’ liberal ideology, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung was telling reporters that Trump was not “brat” — referring to the artist’s neon-green, hyper-pop album that has become associated with the vice president.

“President Trump is a truth-teller, and there is nothing more unifying than telling the truth about a weak, failed, incompetent, and dangerously liberal Kamala Harris and her destructive policies,” Cheung wrote in response to a request for comment.

Rob Stutzman, a California-based Republican political consultant, described the lack of a settled attack line on Harris as a reflection of insufficient data so early in her campaign about what hits will resonate.

But that’s a problem Democrats have, too, he said, especially around how aggressively to define Harris as a prosecutor.

“This is probably not a complete control-alt-delete, but it does reset the data that everyone has been focused on for this election, and I think it’s true of both sides,” Stutzman said.

What the data ultimately says about how best to define Harris, he said, is “as much a D issue as an R issue.”

Why are young women so prominent in anti-Israel protests?

Dozens of other democracies have short election cycles. Can the Democrats learn something from them?

The GOP has historically made inroads with this group. A Trump-Harris match-up would offer a big test.

Louis Conte, Headlines Editor, The Kennedy Beacon

Joe Biden did not give an adequate rationale as to why he waited so long to make the decision to end his reelection campaign.

He said a lot about democracy. But that's not really why he quit.

The Secret Service was already facing its biggest crisis in decades following the narrowly avoided assassination of Donald Trump. Now it has a major new task: protecting Kamala Harris not just as the sitting vice president, but as the likely Democratic presidential nominee.

And the security risks facing Harris are indeed greater simply because of who she is, as a woman and person of color — and the agency is almost certainly taking that into account.

That’s according to Jeff James, who worked in the Secret Service for 22 years and resigned in 2018 after rising to the rank of assistant special agent in charge. Over the course of his career at the agency, James served on President George W. Bush’s protective detail and pitched in from time to time to protect Trump while he was in office. James is now the president of Capitol Security Consultants, a firm that provides risk assessment and security training.

“I think you’d be surprised,” he said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine, “how many people in 2024 still have a very closed mindset and think the president should be a white Christian male, and anything outside of that is unacceptable.”

James also talked about the difficulties of allocating blame for the attempted assassination of Trump given what we currently know — and don’t know. He’s not convinced Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle should have resigned despite the growing bipartisan pressure to do so, even as he refused to downplay the incident.

“We almost had a situation where we would be talking Butler, Pennsylvania, in the same breath as Dallas and Ford’s Theater,” he said, “so somebody needs to be held accountable.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This week, Kamala Harris went from being the sitting vice president to the Democrats’ likely nominee for president. What kind of changes to her protection detail would you expect or want to see given that transition?

Well, her protective detail is in a pretty high stage by virtue of her being the vice president.

I think what you may see is that since she’s going to start going to so many cities to campaign — and I’ve seen candidates in the past hit five cities in a day — what they’ll probably do is augment the vice president’s detail with people from CNOS, the Candidate Nominee Operation Section, to do the advance work. Just because the vice president’s detail doesn’t have the people to support five advance teams as well as her day-to-day protection.

What does the CNOS do?

A year ago, the Secret Service put together multiple details [in preparation for the election]. I remember there being as many as a dozen leading up to the campaign season. All they do is number them: “You’re detail one. You’re detail two. You’re detail three.” As candidates would qualify for Secret Service protection, the details would get activated.

What’s happening now is these details are sitting and waiting to be activated. One was just activated last week for JD Vance, when Donald Trump named him as his running mate. They’re going to use them for whoever Vice President Harris picks as her running mate. They’ll wait and they’ll activate them when she names somebody.

There were some years that almost every detail was used because there were so many people under protection. It was Ben Carson and Rick Santorum and Hillary Clinton, and there were so many, but this year, there was really no need for activation because the two main people who were running were under protection already. The only activation that was needed was for Mr. Vance.

For Harris in particular, how concerned would you be in terms of the threats against her? Are they bigger or different because she’s a woman and a person of color?

I will tell you throughout my career, I saw people hate candidates for every reason.

They hated Mitt Romney because he was Mormon. They hated Hillary Clinton because she was a woman. They hated the second George Bush because he was the son of privilege, and it was an unfair advantage. They hated Barack Obama because he was African American.

But being that Kamala Harris is both a woman and a person of color, I’m sure the Secret Service is prepared for the heightened threat against her.

I think you’d be surprised how many people in 2024 still have a very closed mindset and think the president should be a white Christian male, and anything outside of that is unacceptable. I don’t have any access to the intelligence surrounding Vice President Harris, but if my experience is any indicator, it is going to be a heightened level of concern for sure.

Are there any specific lessons you think the agency can take away from protecting Barack Obama as president and Hillary Clinton as the 2016 Democratic nominee?

You need to look at the intelligence that’s right in front of you.

We got guilty for a little while after Sept. 11 of only being worried about people who fit the profile of that Middle Eastern male. Not that we forgot about things like militia groups and homegrown terrorists, but we got so focused on that one thing for a while that we had to remember, “Hey, we’ve got to stretch our legs and look at everything here.”

The Secret Service is the consumer of intelligence. We really don’t go out there and develop our own. We don’t have assets out there developing intelligence for us. We take it from the NSA and the CIA and our intelligence partners.

When they come to us and say, “We’ve got this militia group where we have somebody on the inside. They say they’re plotting a hit against Vice President Harris,” that’s actionable intelligence that we can move on. They’re just going to need to make sure that they view all actionable intelligence as the possibility that this might happen tomorrow rather than saying, “Well, she’s not going to that part of the country. This militia group is in Georgia, and she’s going to New York, so we don’t have to worry about that.”

They need to make sure that they still worry about it.

That’s a very concrete, interesting example. Does the Secret Service have to worry about things like crazy people posting on the internet?

We take every threat seriously, and we run it to the ground.

It can come to us in several ways. One is somebody contacts [the protectee] directly — sends an email to the vice president’s office: “I’m going to kill her before she gets a chance to be elected.” Alright, we move on that.

Sometimes it comes to us through our intelligence partners, as I mentioned, but other times it comes to us through citizens. Say someone calls and says, “Hey, I was in a bar the other night, and this guy was sitting at the end of the bar. They showed Kamala Harris on the news, and he said, ‘If she gets elected, I’m getting my rifle and I’m going to D.C. and I’m going to fix the problem.’”

Now, we go out, we interview everybody. If that person tells us, “Look, I was drunk, I just lost my job, I’m frustrated, my wife says she’s going to take the kids and leave me,” and he doesn’t have any specific training, he doesn’t own weapons — alright, that’s someone whose name is going to be with us the rest of their life, but it’s not somebody we have to actively surveil or anything like that.

But if we do some research and we find out that they’re posting a lot of negative stuff, they have military training, they have access to weapons, the ability to travel — that’s something that’s actionable, that we’re going to move on pretty quickly and maybe even move toward prosecution for that.

What’s interesting, though, is that if you go all the way back to Lee Harvey Oswald, everyone who either shot a president like John Hinckley did, or like [Thomas Matthew] Crooks did, or tried to kill someone under Secret Service protection, we had never heard of any of them prior to the attack, except for one person.

That was Sara Jane Moore. She came on the Secret Service radar, and she was interviewed by an agent who deemed her not to be a threat. A couple of weeks later, she took a shot at President Ford.

 Let’s turn to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, which, remarkably, was less than two weeks ago. We’re talking the day after Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned as a result of that attempted assassination.

People in Washington love a high-profile scalp. But was this resignation actually justified given what we know so far about what happened?

I would have rather seen the results of the FBI investigation before any heads were put on the chopping block. What we’re hearing now reported is that yes, the Secret Service did assign local law enforcement to be on that roof. And local law enforcement walked off post.

Now, do people go back and apologize to Director Cheatle in a month when that [FBI] report comes out? Probably not.

I would have rather seen the report, and if we found out that this is systemic and the I’s aren’t getting dotted and the T’s aren’t getting crossed [in the agency], then maybe she deserves to be fired. But if we find out it was the fault of someone outside the agency, and the agency put a contingency in place to stop that, and it just wasn’t fulfilled, then I think we have a different story.

I will point out too that after the greatest intelligence failure in U.S. history — Sept. 11 — the CIA director, the FBI director and the NSA director all kept their jobs. Robert Mueller kept his [as FBI chief] for another 12 years.

Look, I get it, they’re hungry, especially the people who are fans of former President Trump. As a citizen, I want answers too, but I’m willing to wait for the answers. Let me hear what actually happened, because I don’t want to have to speculate. I don’t want to have to guess.

What are the big outstanding questions that you have at this point about failures or missteps at the Secret Service that may have occurred? Should more people lose their jobs? What are you looking for answers on?

We know dominoes fell that led to that young man being able to get on that roof. I’d like to know what dominoes fell. Who wasn’t where they should have been, and why weren’t they there?

Like I said, if it’s just that the Secret Service was negligent and didn’t assign anybody to a position that obviously posed a threat to someone under protection, then yeah, Secret Service people need to go. But if we find out that the Secret Service asked somebody to cover that and the other agency just failed to do it, then maybe someone in the other agency needs to pay.

We almost had a situation where we would be talking Butler, Pennsylvania in the same breath as Dallas and Ford’s Theater, so somebody needs to be held accountable. Absolutely. And the Secret Service is ultimately responsible for the whole ball of wax that is that protection bubble.

But you also need to be able to give someone an assignment and walk away and do your assignment and trust that they’re going to fulfill the mission you gave them. If we find out that’s what happened, it’s kind of hard to blame that site agent, it’s kind of hard to blame the director if they put the mitigations in place, but the people who they were depending on to do it had a failure.

If the policy is right but the execution is wrong, that’s a different type of thing.

Right. That’s a great way to put it.

The Secret Service has now reportedly asked the Trump campaign to stop holding large outdoor rallies</b>","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/23/trump-rallies-secret-service-change/","_id":"00000190-ef77-d4ed-add3-ef77955e0002","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"00000190-ef77-d4ed-add3-ef77955e0003","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}">stop holding large outdoor rallies. Do you think that should have happened sooner?

I certainly don’t know this, but you might see everybody — the president, the vice president, candidates — stop these outdoor rallies.

I understand, you can fit 15,000 people into an arena, but you can fit 25,000 into a fairgrounds. They want to be in front of as many people as they can. The picture looks great when the place is full.

But they are the hardest thing I did in 22 years.

Everybody now is talking about the perimeter. Where should your perimeter stop? Heavy mortars can fire from 9,000 yards away. Medium mortars can be 4,000 yards away. And you have no mitigations for that. There’s nothing you can do except try to run when you hear it come in.

When your site has thousands of yards of sight-line and trees and buildings — that’s the other thing. This little map they keep showing on TV of the building where the shooter was — if you were to expand that out on Google Maps, you’d see there are dozens of buildings. So people were saying, “Oh, the snipers just had one job to watch this one building.” No, they had dozens of buildings to look at.

I wouldn’t be shocked if you saw candidates and other people under Secret Service protection saying, “You know what? We’re just not going to do that anymore.”

I’m curious why the Secret Service would not have encouraged candidates to hold off on these large rallies — to tell them it’s not a great idea.

The thing is that they’ve just been happening forever. I walked in a couple of parades with people I protected. I walked in one of the St. Patrick’s Day parades with President Bush in Chicago, and it was just a sea of humanity on both sides of the street, just colors and people holding up their phones to take pictures.

It makes you fatigued in a way that nothing else does. You are just looking so hard for that one thing that stands out — somebody getting ready to throw something or a gun coming up over the crowd. Those outdoor events are a monster. They really are.

On Jan. 6, 2025, Vice President Kamala Harris is set to preside over Congress and count the electoral votes that will make either her — or Donald Trump — the 47th president of the United States.

And like her predecessor Mike Pence, who resisted enormous pressure from Trump to upend the 2020 election results, Harris says she won’t interfere.

Harris believes that her role in the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress is purely ceremonial — to simply tally up the electoral votes certified by the states — according to spokesperson Kirsten Allen. Though she has long praised Pence’s actions, and Democrats have widely repudiated Trump’s pressure campaign on his vice president, it’s the first time Harris’ team has made that explicit commitment in the run-up to the 2024 election.

Harris’ advisers pointed this week to 2022 legislation signed by President Joe Biden affirming the vice president’s “ministerial” role in the process.

And her view accords with the deeply rooted understanding that the vice president has no constitutional authority to decide which electoral votes to count. Under the 12th Amendment, the vice president’s power is limited to simply opening envelopes delivered by the states and tallying the results.

Yet after the 2020 election, Trump and his allies, in a last-ditch effort to remain in power, devised a fringe legal theory claiming the vice president could unilaterally reject or refuse to count electoral votes, or delay the count altogether.

Pence refused to take those steps, drawing Trump’s fury and inflaming a mob that stormed the Capitol to interfere with the transfer of power. Some members of that mob chanted “Hang Mike Pence” as they ransacked the building on Jan. 6, 2021, forcing Pence and Congress to flee for safety. Harris herself — at the time a sitting senator and the vice president-elect — had left the Capitol earlier in the day and was inside the Democratic National Committee building when a pipe bomb was discovered outside, a fact first reported by POLITICO a year after the attack.

Next Jan. 6, Harris will sit in the same chair Pence occupied — an irony that isn’t lost on the aides and advisers who helped Pence reject Trump’s pressure campaign. They spent the days before Jan. 6, 2021, invoking Harris’ name and urging Trump and his allies to consider what would happen if Pence embraced their fringe proposal — and set a precedent for the future.

“There was never an acknowledgement of the symmetrical situation you could find yourself in if the Democrats were in power,” Marc Short, a longtime Pence adviser who served as his chief of staff, said in a phone interview this week.

Harris’ acknowledgment, through her aides, that she intends to reaffirm the vice president’s traditional role in the electoral vote count carries even greater significance now that she is all but certain to be the Democratic presidential nominee. She is set — like a handful of her forebears — to preside over a process that will confirm her win or loss. In addition to Pence in 2021, several recent vice presidents have overseen their own ticket’s defeat during the Electoral College vote count, including Al Gore in 2001 and Richard Nixon in 1961. George H.W. Bush, on the other hand, presided in 1989 over an Electoral College victory that made him the 41st president.

Trump has never renounced the failed theory about the vice president’s role, even as he and many of his allies face criminal charges over their attempts to deploy that theory and use other tactics to subvert Biden’s victory. In fact, he has pointed to Biden’s decision to sign the 2022 law updating the electoral count procedures as evidence his initial plan was correct. And Trump’s 2024 vice presidential pick, JD Vance, has said he would have obeyed Trump’s commands — and perhaps even gone further — to disrupt the transfer of power in 2021.

The stark contrast by Harris may not be surprising, but it’s significant, said Matthew Seligman, a fellow at Stanford University’s Constitutional Law Center.

“The Democrats have said and seem to genuinely believe that the stakes of this election are extraordinarily high both on policy and the rule of law. Even then, Vice President Harris is saying she won’t seize unconstitutional powers,” Seligman said. “She’s not going to burn the system down in order to save it.”

The details of Trump’s 2020 gambit were defined by attorneys like John Eastman and Ken Chesebro — both of whom have faced criminal prosecution alongside Trump. They argued after the election that Pence had the authority to simply refuse to count dozens of Biden’s electors. Pence, they said, could order that the contest be returned to states with Republican-controlled legislatures to consider whether they should be replaced with pro-Trump alternatives.

Pence and his allies vehemently resisted the effort, in part by noting that it would set a precedent that could be used by none other than Harris should she be in the chair in 2025. For many reasons, including Harris’ recent ascent to become the likely Democratic nominee, they see their decision as vindicated.

“The logical absurdity of the argument that the vice president can choose which slates of electors to accept or reject is that the same proponents … wouldn’t want to consider the consequences of a Democrat vice president,” Short said. “That’s exactly the situation we face now.”

Harris, as vice president, holds the title of “president of the Senate,” a largely ceremonial role that is best known for breaking ties on legislation and executive branch or judicial nominees. But the position also empowers her to lead the counting of Electoral College votes during a constitutionally mandated joint session of Congress that is required to occur on Jan. 6 following the presidential election. Barring any unexpected developments — such as a decision to recuse from the process, kicking it to the Senate president pro tem — Harris is slated to fulfill that duty.

Days before Jan. 6, 2021, Short and Greg Jacob, Pence’s former legal counsel, warned of the risk of empowering Democrats to similarly overturn future elections. It wasn’t their primary point; rather, they contended that Pence simply lacked the authority to take such radical steps to upend the election and that the framers of the Constitution never envisioned vesting such extraordinary power in a single person.

But in testimony to the House’s Jan. 6 select committee, both men said that Trump and his allies declined to grapple with the possibility of a future scenario in which Democrats could turn the tables.

“Are you really saying, John, that Al Gore could have just declared himself the winner of Florida and moved along?" Jacob recalled of a Jan. 4, 2021, conversation with Eastman.

"Well, no, no, there wasn't enough evidence for that,” Jacob recalled Eastman replying. “It wasn't clear how he drew the line that that worked … if indeed it did mean that the vice president had such authority, you could never have a party switch thereafter. You would just have the same party win continuously if indeed a vice president had the authority to just declare the winner of every state … He acknowledged that he didn't think Kamala Harris should have that authority in 2024.”

Eastman told POLITICO this week that his arguments about Harris’ potential power was narrower than Jacob described, saying it was only about whether she could “unilaterally reject electors in a context where there was only one slate of certified electors, and I took the same position against that as I had taken with Pence.”

He noted that some experts had called the vice president’s involvement in the electoral count a “constitutional flaw” and suggested the role should have been granted to the chief justice of the Supreme Court instead. He also noted that a vice president could recuse from the process when there is a “direct conflict,” as some Trump allies proposed Pence should do in 2021.

“Of course, anyone asserting that the VP has such a role would have to concede that my interpretation in 2020 was valid or at least debatable,” Eastman added.

The 2022 law that Biden signed, called the Electoral Count Reform Act, was intended to underscore the “ministerial” role of the vice president in counting electors. The law also makes it harder for members of Congress to lodge challenges to states’ certified electors, and it details procedures for resolving conflicts. The law was the most significant update to the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which laid out the procedures that have governed every presidential election since. The Trump-Harris contest will be the first election certified under the updated law.

Under Eastman’s theory, any laws limiting the vice president’s discretion are unconstitutional, and he urged Pence to refuse to abide by the Electoral Count Act. Investigators and courts have cited that request to violate the law as proof of potential criminality. Eastman argues that there is precedent for vice presidents exercising judgment to count disputed electors, such as Thomas Jefferson’s decision to resolve an issue with Georgia’s ballots in 1801. Other constitutional scholars dispute that premise.

Eastman is currently fighting a California judge’s disbarment recommendation following a months-long series of hearings analyzing his 2020 legal theory.

Vice President Kamala Harris is moving into the lead role of selling the U.S. economy to voters just as the pitch is getting easier to make.

The government said Thursday that GDP increased at an annualized pace of 2.8 percent from April through June, far better than expected, even as a key measure of inflation has dropped below 3 percent.

That means the economy has stayed resilient without further stoking price spikes, leaving open a path for the Federal Reserve to begin cutting rates in September — a process that could lead to lower borrowing costs on everything from cars to homes.

“Overall, it’s a strong economy, and if you look at the different political forecasting models, the fundamentals are on the side of Harris,” said Jason Furman, a professor at Harvard University who previously served as chief economist to President Barack Obama.

Yet with just over 100 days until the presidential election, it’s unclear whether Harris will have any more luck than President Joe Biden did in boosting Americans' sentiments about the economy. While the U.S. has been experiencing steady growth and modern-era lows in joblessness for years now, that positive news has been dwarfed by widespread concerns about affordability amid multiple years of price spikes. But as inflation cools, people might begin to adapt to new higher cost levels, particularly as wages are now rising faster than prices.

One possible ray of hope for Harris: Polling firm Blueprint recently found only 23 percent of voters associate her with inflation.

The economy's growth in the second quarter was bolstered by robust consumer spending and business investment. Biden issued a statement after the report saying it “makes clear we now have the strongest economy in the world” and giving credit to “my and Vice President Harris’s economic agenda.”

In the meantime, Republicans continued to hammer Harris and other Democrats about how much prices have risen over the course of Biden’s presidency.

“The damage from Democrats’ reckless spending and the Biden-Harris Administration’s failed economic policies is done,” House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington said in a statement. “The goal should be to bring down the stubborn inflation that is crushing the American people and the high interest rates that are fueling the cost-of-living crisis.”

Although the topline GDP increase in the second quarter was much higher than the first — 2.8 percent vs. 1.4 percent — the underlying rate as measured by spending and investment showed that growth in the first half of the year held steady at about 2.6 percent.

Of course, the outlook is not without risks, even as the economy has held up much better than expected in the face of the Fed’s rate hike campaign.

Furman said there was “a little bit of an asterisk” on inflation, which hasn’t been tamed entirely, and economic growth at these levels could still keep prices rising faster than the Fed wants.

On the flip side, borrowing costs this high are weighing on economic activity, and the job market could weaken unexpectedly. The unemployment rate has increased from lows of 3.4 percent to 4.1 percent, but both the slow speed of the rise and the still-low level of joblessness — layoffs remain low — don’t suggest a recession is imminent.

“Rising unemployment and slowing wage growth will both scare people into saving more and constrain the spending power of people who remain unworried about the job market,” Pantheon Macro said in a note to clients.

Corporate investments have steadily risen over the past three quarters, suggesting that the private sector remains optimistic about the economy’s future prospects. But Pantheon said that trend isn’t guaranteed to continue.

“Business [investment] too is likely rise only modestly, given the severe financing constraint on small companies and the uncertainty over the economic outlook,” according to the firm, noting that President Donald Trump’s trade policy is also a concern: “An election campaign in which the current front-runner is threatening massive import tariffs is a disincentive to invest too.”

Strongly condemning the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris's, failure to secure the United States border. (07/25/2024 legislative day)