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Leonard Greene is a columnist for the New York Daily News.
They still don’t get it.
While President-elect Donald Trump is working assembling his White House cabinet, Democrats in some circles are still concocting ways to elevate Kamala Harris.
They need to follow the advice of ice queen Elsa from the movie “Frozen.”
Let it go.
One nutty idea has President Joe Biden resigning from office and allowing Harris to take over and become the 47th president before Trump steps up in January and lays claim to the number. “He could resign the presidency in the next 30 days, make Kamala Harris the president of the United States,” Jamal Simmons, Harris’ former communications director, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
If the goal is to disrupt some of Trump’s merchandising, it’s a great idea. All the red MAGA hats and t-shirts that say “47” would have to be changed to “48.”
But if the goal is to move the needle forward for a party that lost the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, it has that closing-the-barn-door-after-the-horses-get-out feel to it. The time for Biden to have resigned was over the summer, when the momentum of history and incumbency could have done Harris some good.
All it would be now is a quirky consolation prize, which is the last thing America and Black women need.
Nearly as short-sighted is a long-shot plan to put Harris on the U.S. Supreme Court before Biden’s term expires.
The problem with this plan is that there is no vacancy. To create one, proponents suggest convincing Justice Sonia Sotomayor, 70, to step down because she has some health problems. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 87, died in the final months of Trump’s presidency, allowing him to nominate Amy Coney Barrett and moving the Supreme Court to a 6-3 conservative majority that in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion ruling.
In just four years, Trump was able to put three justices on the court. Biden has nominated only one person to the court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the nation’s first female Black Supreme Court justice.
Sotomayor, the senior member of the court’s liberal minority, has given no indication that she would go along with the plan, one that would do nothing to change the court’s balance of power. Biden, who showed his own reluctance to step aside, doesn’t appear likely to ask Sotomayor to give up her lifetime appointment.
“When it comes to those types of decisions, those are personal decisions, regardless of if it’s Justice Sotomayor or any other justice on the bench,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in March, when the idea of targeting Sotomayor’s seat was first floated.
If the Democrats, Biden included, were so determined to keep Trump from having another opportunity to put someone on the court, they should have come up with a better strategy — and message — to keep him out of the White House again.
These aren’t real ideas. They’re internet memes. They’re intricate plots for streaming political dramas on Hulu or Netflix. They are page-turning fiction novels.
They’re candy.
Meanwhile, Trump is appointing his cabinet. Next on his list of nominees could be the My Pillow guy.
What the Democrats have needed to do, from the moment the electoral votes were counted, was start looking and planning ahead. No more wound licking. No more finger pointing.
No more kooky ideas.
Kamala Harris fought a great fight. But she lost. It’s over.
It’s time to let it go.
