Following a bombshell CNN report this week about the growing rift between Vice President Kamala Harris and other White House officials, rumors have been flying on Capitol Hill that could have Harris exchanging her trademark cackle for chants of “Let’s Go Brandon.”
According to Fox News anchor Jesse Watters, the House of Representatives may be preparing to conduct confirmation hearings on a new vice presidential nominee.
WOAH: There’s talk on Capitol Hill about the mechanics of a confirmation hearing to fill a VP vacancy amid Kamala’s nose-diving approval numbers and reports of a strained relationship between Biden and Harris pic.twitter.com/9W0AUakmiw
— Benny (@bennyjohnson) November 17, 2021
Watters spoke to Capitol Hill correspondent Chad Pergram regarding “whispers suggesting there could be some new high profile confirmation hearings on the horizon in the House of Representatives,” he reported Tuesday.
“I got a message recently from someone who knows Capitol Hill very well,” Pergram told Watters, ” and they suggested I should familiarize myself with the process to confirm a vacancy for the Vice President in the Senate and in the House.”
These rumors are a “big deal,” according to Watters, because “the House does not confirm normal nominees, but it does confirm vice presidential nominees.”
Moreover, “it’s no secret” that Harris, whose approval rating is hovering around 28%, has been “running out of favor with the Biden team,” he added.
“To be clear,” Pergram was quick to note, “this is not to say that something is afoot here.”
In order for something to be afoot, it would seem that Harris herself would have to be involved.
A vice president, like the president, cannot be removed from office except, as the Article II of the Constitution says, through the process of “impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Harris might be persuaded to resign—Biden himself considered resigning the vice presidency when his son was diagnosed with terminal cancer—but such a decision would be extremely unlikely.
In the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker suggested, however, that resignation might be in Harris’s best interest.
Harris is “beginning to get the picture,” according to Parker. “In no other recent presidency has a vice president been so ill-prepared for office—or because of Biden’s age, more in need of being ready.”
Only two vice presidents have resigned (John C. Calhoun in 1832 and Spiro T. Agnew in 1973) since the Constitution was ratified in 1789.
The process for replacing a vice president is laid out in the 25th Amendment:
Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.
Such a move would hold the risk, however, that until confirmation the Democrats would lack the vice president’s tie-breaking vote in an evenly divided Senate.
