Justice Kamala Harris Will Never Happen

C lose Twitter, turn off your TV, and suppress the palace whispering for a moment so that you might better understand a truth that obtains now, and for all time beyond: Vice President Kamala Harris is not going to be nominated for the United States Supreme Court. The idea is a joke, a reverie, a distraction. Harris has none of the qualifications for the job; she has none of the support she’d need to get there; and, as even her most ardent fans must by now intuit, her elevation would be a disaster for her own side. That President Biden has attached himself to such an anvil may be plausibly regarded as a misfortune. To attach himself twice would look like carelessness.

As for the agreement of the Senate? Fuggedaboutit. The case in favor is that the Democrats — even Biden himself — are desperate to get rid of her. But the Supreme Court is for life, not for Christmas. At this rate, Democrats will be rid of Kamala Harris in just under three excruciating years. If, by contrast, she were to be parachuted onto the Supreme Court, she would blot their escutcheon for life. If you want a picture of a future in which Harris is wearing a black robe, imagine a cackling mediocrity dissenting fruitlessly from the bench — forever.

Besides, there is such a thing as going too far with a ruse. The Democrats have become pretty darned unsubtle about their desire to treat the Court as a super-legislature, but adding the sitting vice president to its ranks would make their game clear to even the dullest of political observers. It is one thing to find the right to abortion in the emanations and penumbras of an 18th-century script, but it is quite another to find the unabridged text of Build Back Better. Imagine, if you will, an opinion that begins, “It is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day,” and you’ll have the full measure of the futility that Harris would bring to bear. And for what? If the Democrats wanted a garrulous platitude machine who was willing to toe the line, they would have urged Justice Breyer to stay.

So no, it’s not going to happen. In our “living constitutionalist” era, it would do the Democrats no good at all to mix up their precedents and their vice presidents, and it would do them even less good to ensure that the least popular star in their fading constellation is featured on cable television without respite between now and the end of the year. By design and cultivation, the judges on Biden’s shortlist will have sterilized political trails. Harris, conversely, has painted luminous warning lines across every road in the United States. Told in 2019 that she could not ban rifles by executive order alone, Harris appealed to the Constitution’s largely forgotten Slogan Clause. “Instead of saying, ‘No, we can’t,’” she replied, “Let’s say, ‘Yes we can.’” A hearing starring Harris would resemble a piece of absurdist art. “I can’t comment on that,” she would say at each juncture. And the examiner would roll the tape.

As ever, the reality will be much duller than the fiction. Today, President Biden will stand beside a smiling Stephen Breyer and thank him profusely for his service. Over the next few weeks, the contenders for his chair will be named in dribs and drabs. After the finalist has been selected, there will be a hearing, at which the Senate will showboat and the nominee will mimic a prisoner of war. And, in July or August — or September if there’s a glitch — 52 of the 100 senators will readily consent to the pick. And that, as they say, will be that.

On the campaign trail, Kamala Harris liked to say that she believed in “that old adage, that ‘as goes California, so goes the country,’” and, for once, she was right on the money. Ceteris paribus, Harris has about the same chance of being nominated for the Supreme Court as she had of winning the California presidential primary before she dropped out: none.