President Joe Biden announced on Thursday that Vice President Kamala Harris will lead the new federal office of gun violence prevention after she produced questionable results on the border and with voting rights legislation.
The office will reportedly act as a coordinated effort between the Biden White House, the Community Justice Action Fund, and Everytown for Gun Safety. Activists argue that the office will allow the administration to coordinate on gun control issues across the federal government.
“Our promise to the American people is this: we will not stop working to end the epidemic of gun violence in every community, because we do not have a moment, nor a life, to spare,” Harris said.
However, Harris’s leadership on key policy issues such as gun control, artificial intelligence, and the migrant crisis has either been fraught with gaffes or has produced no substantive change.
During a roundtable in July, Harris attempted to explain artificial intelligence to a group of labor and civil rights leaders and instead her speech became a word salad.
“I think the first part of this issue that should be articulated is AI is kind of a fancy thing. First of all, it’s two letters. It means artificial intelligence, but ultimately what it is, is it’s about machine learning,” she said.
“And so, the machine is taught — and part of the issue here is what information is going into the machine that will then determine — and we can predict then, if we think about what information is going in, what then will be produced in terms of decisions and opinions that may be made through that process,” the vice president continued.
In 2021, Biden put Harris in charge of tackling the “root causes” of the migrant crisis, which has continued despite the vice president’s efforts.
Instead of enacting policies that conservatives have said would tackle the border crisis, such as former President Donald Trump’s Remain-in-Mexico policy or building a border wall, Harris has moved to invest in Central America. Her move was panned by the National Border Patrol Council. Even leftist outlets such as CNN have noted that border crossings remain historically high despite her $4.2 billion in private sector investments in Central America.
Biden also assigned Harris to lead Democrats in a sweeping legislative effort to protect voting rights, with New York Magazine saying Harris would become the “public face of a doomed effort” to enact major voting-rights legislation without breaking the Senate’s 60-vote threshold. Democrats did not pass their signature voting rights bill, H.R. 1, called the For the People Act.