President Joe Biden has another hot-button crisis for Vice President Kamala Harris to jump in on: This one is election reform, which he considered a "truly unprecedented assault on our democracy."
And it comes amid long-held Republican criticism on her lack of showing up at the southern border to address the past one, the border crisis.
"To signify the importance of our efforts, today, I'm asking Vice President Harris to help these efforts and lead them among her many other responsibilities," Biden told in the Tulsa, Oklahoma, community known as Black Wall Street on the 100th anniversary of a race massacre.
"With her leadership and your support, we're going to overcome again, I promise you, but it's going to take a hell of a lot of work."
The move comes as Democrats have rejected election reforms in states like Georgia and Texas, opposing the Republican efforts to provide for voter identification and regulating voting dropboxes, ballot harvesting, and mass mail-in balloting.
"President Joe Biden asked me to help lead our administration's effort to protect the fundamental right to vote for all Americans," Harris wrote in a statement after the event Tuesday.
"In the days and weeks ahead, I will engage the American people, and I will work with voting rights organizations, community organizations, and the private sector to help strengthen and uplift efforts on voting rights nationwide. And we will also work with members of Congress to help advance these bills.
"The work ahead of us is to make voting accessible to all American voters, and to make sure every vote is counted through a free, fair, and transparent process. This is the work of democracy."
Working with Congress means just Democrats, Republicans argue, noting the For the People Act (S.R. 1) and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act favor only Democrats in future elections.
"In my state in Oklahoma, we have great voting engagement," Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said last week. "We want to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. S1 takes away a state's ability to hold people accountable for cheating," Lankford said.
Republicans are also adamant voter ID laws are not systemically racist, as the Biden administration is attempting to argue.
"In reality, everybody knows you have to have a photo ID," Texas AG Ken Paxton said this weekend. "The only reason you don't want people to have a photo ID is that people can cheat. That's the only rational answer as to why certain people want no photo ID requirements.
"The only argument they had is they claimed it was discriminatory," Paxton added. "We know it is not discriminatory, because everyone knows you have to have a photo ID.
"Even if they are poor, they have to have one to do everything in life, including to get other state and federal benefits," he continued.
"That's a red herring. It's just not true. And the reality is everybody said it would suppress the vote, photo ID, and the reality is our voting participation went up."
Also, as Ric Grenell told Newsmax's "Cortes & Pellegrino" on Monday night, Harris has already been ineffectual on the southern border crisis.
"What we're seeing now is Kamala Harris really stumble on the national stage," Grenell said. "Whether it's her inability to go down and communicate on the border why she's in charge or what the problems are, or articulate why she's not going to physically be there."
The House Judiciary GOP Twitter account tweeted earlier Tuesday:
"Today would be a good day for Vice President Harris to visit the southern border."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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