As part of its promotion of Kamala Harris’s candidacy, the legacy media is working overtime to deny that President Biden named his vice president as “border czar.”
As NR’s Matthew Wilson noted, Axios has hilariously been trying to do cleanup on its repeated labeling of Harris as “border czar.” (The BBC described her that way as well.) Joining Axios in retailing the Harris-for-president talking points are Time, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, and no doubt many other tentacles of the media octopus.
But of course she was the border czar.
Czars in the non-Romanov sense have been around in some sense for a century or more, but the idea of a “czar” in charge of a specific policy issue really took off in the FDR administration during World War II, with a transportation czar, a shipping czar, even a synthetic-rubber czar.
More recently, Bill Bennett, one-time contributor to this journal, was named the first drug czar by President George H. W. Bush. Obama had more czars than Moscow, including a climate czar, a green-jobs czar, and a car czar. (Alan Bersin was his border czar.)
Here’s some of what President Biden said a couple of months into his term when naming Harris border czar:
I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.
And later on:
And so, this increase has been consequential, but the Vice President has agreed . . . to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept the returnees and enhance migration enforcement at their borders.
And finally:
So it’s not her full responsibility and job, but she’s leading the effort because I think the best thing to do is to put someone who, when he or she speaks, they don’t have to wonder about is that where the President is. When she speaks, she speaks for me.
In other words, she was border czar. In fact, Harris was the replacement for Biden’s previous border czar, Roberta Jackson, who formally stepped down from the post a few weeks after the president’s announcement of Harris’s new responsibility.
. . .
[Read the rest at National Review.]