Kamala Harris: January 6 Is Not ‘the Problem at Hand’

As I have noted here and here, Democrats are playing a cynical game of bait-and-switch with their rhetoric about January 6 and how “democracy is on the ballot,” and they continued to do that this morning. On the one hand, they play up the January 6 Capitol riot and its origin in Donald Trump’s extended effort to convince state legislatures, governors, and the vice president to throw out electors chosen by the official, certified statewide popular vote count. On the other hand, their proposed “solutions” are a bunch of things they proposed on voting and election law before the 2020 election that have nothing at all to do with throwing out electors chosen by the official, certified statewide popular vote counts.

Kamala Harris said out loud today that she is unwilling to accept a standalone reform of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 — the solution directly targeted at that problem — on the grounds that it is “not a solution to the problem at hand.” She went further and argued that, without the Democrats’ proposals, we do not have “free and fair elections.” In other words: Instead of shoring up the defenses of democratic outcomes against the sort of thing that happened last January 6, Harris (like Chuck Schumer) prefers to cast doubt on the legitimacy of those outcomes and focus her fire on solutions having nothing to do with January 6.