However, according to a forthcoming book by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns of the New York Times, Harris quickly discovered the limits of Biden’s vow when she waded into a sensitive negotiation over infrastructure spending.
In a meeting last May, Biden attempted to persuade Republican lawmakers to back $1 trillion in new spending. “Harris thought that there was something missing from the conversation,” namely the family and social spending programs that Democrats were eager to sign into law, Martin and Burns wrote in This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future. Harris wanted this to be a part of the discussion “and began to make the case for a larger package than the one Republicans seemed to have in mind.”
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“Biden dismissed her comment immediately,” the authors recounted. So harsh was the response “that even the Republican senators were taken aback.”
While Biden was ordinarily “scrupulously respectful” of Harris, the episode reveals the President’s sensitivity around the deal and a moment he felt could compromise it.
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Other meetings played out with more mild friction. The book details a meeting at the White House with governors to discuss Coronavirus relief soon after the pair took office. According to Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, Biden was his usual self, eager to work with the assembled leaders. Still, Hogan described Harris’s role as “very strange.”
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“Harris did not say a word,” Hogan informed Martin and Burns, leaving the governor to question whether she was “just being deferential to the President — didn’t want to step on him.” When Harris’s team attempted to claim a portfolio assignment, floating a proposal for the Vice President to manage ties with the Nordic countries, “White House aides rejected the idea and privately mocked it,” per the book.
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“More irritating to Biden aides was when they learned the Vice President wanted to plan a major speech to outline her view of foreign policy,” the authors wrote. “Biden aides vetoed the idea. Why should a Vice President have their own independently articulated view of global affairs?”
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Later, the President would offer Harris a major assignment dealing with Central American migration — an intractable issue that immediately seemed to frustrate her team. Following a bruising trip to Guatemala and Mexico, Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, a usually stalwart advocate, “reminded her she was hardly the first Vice President to endure tough coverage,” the book recounts.
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