The correct answer to that is no.
The Vice President has never been seen as a co-president. The US Constitution gives the vice president no executive powers and only the legislative power of presiding over the senate. Donald Trump tried to claim there was real power vested in that position, but he was wrong, it's merely ceremonial. This is how Google describes the "power of the vice president":
The Constitution names the vice president of the United States as the president of the Senate. In addition to serving as presiding officer, the vice president has the sole power to break a tie vote in the Senate and formally presides over the receiving and counting of electoral ballots cast in presidential elections.
The vice president has no executive powers at all, and no role in the military chain of command, which flows from the President to the Secretary of Defense to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the heads of the various services, bypassing the vice president entirely. And this is where state power really resides—in the control of the instruments of state violence.
The primary responsibility of the Vice President of the United States is to be ready at a moment’s notice to assume the Presidency if the President is unable to perform his or her duties.
This would require that the Veep be read-in on everything the president is doing, but it doesn't require input from Veep into anything the president is doing. Historically, vice presidents have had no control and very little influence over the policies of their presidents. So, clearly, the vice president is not a co-president, and there's no real basis for treating Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's co-president.
Never in a thousand years did I see myself writing a blog post arguing that the vice president is not a co-president, but this is the silly season and ever since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the 2024 Democratic nominee, at least two groups have found it necessary, or convenient, to treat Kamala Harris as Biden's co-president so that she can be held equally responsible for all the supposed evil he has done.
One group is Trump, and his supporters, obviously. They've spent years building a campaign against Biden. Trump, himself, complains they've spent "hundreds of millions" attacking Biden, before "they" pulled the switch. They'd like to be able to use as much of that as they can against Harris—although they haven't been able to come up with a Hunter angle yet. Still, it's very convenient for them to be able to blame Harris for everything they blamed Biden for. That way they don't have to change their playbook very much, and they can recycle all the old material. Who cares if it really equally applies to Harris? Their job is getting Trump elected, and any mud that might stick to Harris will do, so for all intent and purposes, they have named Kamala Harris Joe Biden's co-president over the last three and a half years.
The other group is those now protesting for Palestine outside of the DNC in Chicago AND are seamlessly replacing their previous invocations against "Genocide Joe" with chats against "Killer Kamala."
Joe Biden, because he had command authority over all military aid flowing to Israel, because he directed the US military to defend Israel while it was assaulting Gaza, and because he casts the US veto to block any meaningful UN action, while more than 40 thousand Palestinians were massacred, may have well earned the label "Genocide Joe." But what has the vice president done to be called a killer? Is everyone in Biden's cabinet also a killer? Everyone in the government? Everyone in the military? On account of what the US has done for Israel? Or is it just convenient for the campist-led pro-Palestine movement to come up with a catchy new label for Harris, "Killer Kamala," recycle the old material, and treat her as though she has been Biden's co-president, and equally responsible for his genocidal Gaza policies.
Harris has her own views on Gaza, and we got a rare window into them through her "Remarks by Vice President Harris Following Meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel". In them she gave perhaps the strongest condemnation by any major US politician of what Israel is doing in Gaza:
I also expressed with the prime minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians. And I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there, with over 2 million people facing high levels of food insecurity and half a million people facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity.What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating — the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third, or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.
Over at Al Jazeera, commentators were ecstatic! While they have been reporting on these conditions for months, it was the first time they had heard anything like this from a spokesperson for the US government—and she said this to Netanyahu's face! Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane said.
“She talked about the number of starvations. The number of people who are food insecure. The number of people who have had to move several times. She talked about seeing pictures of dead children. You don’t see that in the US media. You don’t see it on the front pages of newspapers. Almost hardly at all. There is very little discussion about the plight of the people in Gaza.”
What Harris said certainly wasn't news to them, but they knew it would be news to millions of Americans who got their news on Israel-Gaza solely from US corporate media. Certainly, Biden never spoke out like this. To the "Killer Kamala" crowd it makes no difference. They've got their program and they're sticking to it.
Never mind that the other guy told Netanyahu "It has to get over with fast. ... Get your victory and get it over with," and promised to “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again." Or that there is no split in his party over the question of uncritically supporting Israel no matter what it does. They will focus their anger at Harris, just as if she were Biden, and there is no daylight between them.
With the Republicans, its easy to see why they want to use the same playbook against Harris as Biden because their goal remains the same—to elect Trump. It's not so easy to see why those protesting the suffering in Gaza are falling back on that same approach. There is a opportunist element in this "Uncommitted" movement that support it as a way to take votes away from Trump's opponent. They have backers in the Kremlin, the GOP, and other places where the advantages for Trump of this campaign are well understood. So, it's easy to see why they would follow the MAGA tactic of treating Harris as Biden's co-president. But what about those sincerely in the movement to stop the carnage in Gaza? Shouldn't they allow that Kamala Harris has not been Joe Biden's co-president, should be considered on her own merits, and may be a better choice than Donald Trump when the welfare of the people of Gaza is considered.
Clay Claiborne
20 August 2024
You nailed it. Let's hope that when elected she is strong enough to move beyond positive statements.
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