House GOP shifts firepower from Biden to Harris and Walz

As Democrats enthusiastically turn their attention to the Democratic Party’s new presidential ticket, so have House Republicans, who in recent weeks have launched a series of investigations into Vice President Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

House Republicans, who had spent much of the past 3 1/2 years investigating President Biden, are now re-aiming their congressional firepower at Harris’s limited role in migration and border policy and Walz’s China ties. 

That messaging recalibration extends to terminology.

In the weeks since Biden dropped his reelection bid, some GOP committees have made a noticeable stylistic change to their press releases and letters, adding “-Harris” to many products that previously criticized only the “Biden administration.”

The House Judiciary Committee has mentioned “the Biden-Harris administration” in press releases more times in the past month than it has since President Biden took office.

Some other efforts have been more blatant.

In a move that served to counter pro-Harris messaging at the Democratic National Convention, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), House Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.), and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) held a press call last week criticizing the vice president in the wake of a new inspector general report about the challenge Immigration and Customs Enforcement has had in tracking court dates for unaccompanied migrant children.

The report did not mention Harris at all. But in keeping with the GOP strategy of placing most of the blame for problems at the border on Harris, the Republicans focused almost entirely on her.

“Vice President Harris was put in charge of the border when the UAC [unaccompanied minor] disaster began and — and these original decisions were made, and this is largely her fault and done on her watch,” Johnson said on the call.

While the GOP has tried to pin overall border conditions on Harris, labeling her the “border czar,” her role on the issue was narrower, focused instead on addressing the root causes of migration. The effort to stem flows from the south has largely involved investing heavily in development and democracy building throughout Latin America.

Republicans are also putting investigatory resources behind their criticism.

In another effort to highlight Harris’s involvement in border issues, House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) reached out to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — an agency with little role in responding to broader migration factors — asking for documents and communications with Harris about her work on immigration matters.

Comer did not seek documents from the two agencies most involved in the root causes strategy: the State Department and USAID. While both have numerous resources on the strategy referenced on its websites, the CBP website does not contain a single reference to the program.

In his letter to CBP, Comer said it’s “unclear what actions, if any, Vice President Harris has taken to fix the border crisis.”

The sudden shift in focus to Harris has not been missed by House Democrats, who see it as a broader pattern of using the chamber’s investigative might to aid former President Trump.

“This entire Congress, Chairman Comer has had a simple MO: block any investigation into Donald Trump and use the Committee gavel to conduct sham inquiries into Trump’s political rivals,” a spokesperson with House Oversight Democrats said in a statement.

“Rather than working with House Democrats to pass the bipartisan bill to secure the border or investigate Trump’s receipt of millions of dollars from the Chinese government while he was Commander-in-Chief, he is once again using the Oversight Committee to boost Donald Trump’s failing campaign.”

The pivot to Harris coincides with longtime probes into Biden, focused mostly on alleged connections to his family’s foreign business dealings, fizzling out. 

House Republicans released their much-awaited impeachment inquiry report just ahead of the Democratic National Convention. While it was highly critical of Biden, it did not prove any direct financial ties, and did not recommend moving forward with impeachment articles.

It was met with a scattered reaction from Republicans, many of whom had long been skeptical about any impeachable conduct and were eager to move on from the Biden inquiries.

With Biden no longer serving as the nominee, some suggested the party needed to turn attention to its new main opponent: Harris.

“We have much more work to do to assess how much Kamala Harris and other senior officials knew, when they knew it, and what role they took in covering up for the empty suit in the Oval Office,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) wrote on the social platform X when the report dropped Monday morning. 

And it is not only Harris getting the scrutiny. Lawmakers have also seized on Walz’s connections to China. 

The former educator spent a year teaching in China in 1989, and later led field trips to the country — visiting China dozens of times. 

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) wrote to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin questioning whether Walz complied with foreign travel reporting requirements for his security clearance as he traveled to China while serving in the National Guard.

And in a letter to the FBI, Comer asked the agency to acknowledge whether it has ever offered any defensive briefings to Walz, a practice by which the agency informs politicians and other figures whether they may be a target of Chinese intelligence or influence efforts. Comer also asked the FBI to turn over information on more than a dozen Chinese entities, including some it’s unclear Walz had any contact with.

A Harris-Walz campaign spokesman said in a statement that the governor “has stood up to the CCP [Chinese Communist Party], fought for human rights rights and democracy, and always put American jobs and manufacturing first,” and accused Republicans of “twisting basic facts.”

Walz has also been a critic of China, meeting with the Dalai Lama and a Hong Kong democracy activist, and cosponsoring the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act in the House.

Still, Comer in press interviews is suggesting that Walz’s China ties could be even more concerning than those of Biden’s family members, even while admitting that there is no evidence of financial ties.

“Unlike the relationship that we discovered during our relationship with the Bidens, where China was paying Joe Biden’s family, with Walz it doesn’t appear to be any type of payments being transacted,” Comer said on Fox Business on Friday.

Republicans, Comer added, fear “that it’s an infatuation that Tim Walz has with China, with their communist system, with the way they operated over the last 30 years. And if that’s so, that should be a concern to every American.”