Well, she clearly did in 2019, even if Kamala Harris went about it incompetently. Having a ringside seat to the job for the past eighteen months may have changed her mind, Andrew Stiles argued in the Washington Free Beacon on Friday. As VP, Harris has tried to avoid holding any portfolio so far, and Stiles concludes that she’s seen the boss’ job and no longer wants it.

Before we address that question, we have to address the question that precedes it. Do Democrats want Harris in the first place? Even among the impressive string of Kamala Word Salads leading up to her response on Dobbs, this answer is jaw-dropping:

Holy cow what a bad answer. This is going to cause a Dem revolt. The GOP has been after this for decades. But the Dems thought it settled so did nothing?! https://t.co/QFzkAeSYuO

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) July 9, 2022

Harris thought it was “settled”? Is that why Democrats spent four-plus decades making Roe and then Casey litmus tests for judicial nominees, especially at the appellate level and Supreme Court? There hasn’t been an election cycle since 1980 where Democrats have not made protection and expansion of abortion a front-and-center issue, especially in its fundraising. In 2016 and 2020, Democrats campaigned not on the idea that Roe and Casey had “settled” abortion but to change those “settled” cases to eliminate viability as a legitimate line for restrictions in law. And in all of the 49-plus years of Roe, there have been few years in which states have not made clear through legislation and lawsuits that they considered abortion anything but a “settled” issue.

In fact, that was Justice Samuel Alito’s entire point about the failure of Roe:

The right to abortion does not fall within this category. Until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right was entirely unknown in American law. Indeed, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three quarters of the States made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy. The abortion right is also critically different from any other right that this Court has held to fall within the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of “liberty.” Roe’s defenders characterize the abortion right as similar to the rights recognized in past decisions involving matters such as intimate sexual relations, contraception, and marriage, but abortion is fundamentally different, as both Roe and Casey acknowledged, because it destroys what those decisions called “fetal life” and what the law now before us describes as an “unborn human being.

Stare decisis, the doctrine on which Casey’s controlling opinion was based, does not compel unending adherence to Roe’s abuse of judicial authority. Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.

Harris and the media might want to pretend that Dobbs divided the nation, but that’s what Roe did. It led to fifty years of division and warping of institutions, including the courts. The Left and the media only claim to see Dobbs that way  now because the Left came out on the losing end.

Erick’s correct, however, about the impact that this “oops, our bad” answer will have on Democratic Party activists, especially after Joe Biden’s lame post-Dobbs response. Even if Biden and Harris saw this as “settled” in mid-2021, the fact that the Supreme Court took up this case at all should have alerted them to the unsettled nature of Roe. The oral arguments in December clearly indicated that the court was going to at least rewrite Roe and dump Casey, if not dump it all. The leak at the beginning of May made it very clear that the court would toss both precedents. And yet … Harris and Biden thought it was settled until two weeks ago?

Why would Democrats want to keep any member of this team in charge of anything after this sorry performance?

That brings us to whether they even have to worry about it. Stiles thinks Harris “doesn’t want to be in charge of anything” and is just along for the ride, and makes a pretty good argument. There is, however, an alternate interpretation of his evidence:

At one point, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns recount in the book, Harris corrected Biden during a meeting with leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus. When the president said she would do “a hell of job” handling immigration, Harris immediately chimed in to say that her role would be limited to U.S. relations with the so-called Northern Triangle countries in Central America. During a subsequent visit to Guatemala, the vice president fumbled a question from NBC anchor Lester Holt about why she hadn’t visited the U.S. southern border. “And I haven’t been to Europe,” she cackled.

Days later, Politico published a story headlined, “‘Not a healthy environment’: Kamala Harris’ office rife with dissent,” which detailed the dysfunction in the vice president’s office and was riddled with anonymous quotes from former Harris aides blasting her leadership style. That was around the same time Biden tasked Harris with leading the administration’s effort to promote so-called voting rights. A similar fiasco ensued.

Martin and Burns report that after holding a series of initial meetings with activists, Harris failed to marshal a significant push for voting rights on Capitol Hill. Months after taking the assignment, they note, she had not even spoken about the issue with Sens. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) and Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska), whose votes were crucial to passing legislation in the Senate. …

This attitude is echoed in her response to being asked to handle the response to the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade. She doesn’t want to be “pigeonholed on the issue because of her gender.” OK, then. What, exactly, does she want to be doing? According to Martin and Burns, the vice president’s staff did at one point propose that Harris could oversee “relation with the Nordic countries,” a suggestion that was “rejected” and “privately mocked” by White House aides.

Harris has been notably absent from public leadership throughout her first 17 months on the job. That may not be her choice, however; multiple and ongoing leaks have made it clear that Biden’s staff has kept her away from media, thanks to her series of awful performances, such as the one above. She’s given no indication that she can string a coherent thought together in public, instead routinely stringing dull clichés into repetitive outputs that form the core recipe of Kamala Word Salads.

But, in point of fact, Harris is not in charge of anything  — not because of any demurral but simply out of function. Biden’s in charge and Biden sets the policies, not Harris. Nor has Biden really tasked her to take charge in any real sense. All Biden has done is shifted damaging issues and performance failures to Harris with limited portfolio, which consist entirely of fronting Biden’s ludicrous policies and taking the blame for their inevitable failures. Who would volunteer for that duty, especially now?

If Biden chooses not to run in 2024 — or even if the party makes that choice for him — expect to see Harris injecting herself into any primary discussion. And expect to see Democrats ejecting her quickly right back out of it, perhaps even as quickly as they did in 2019 when they realized what an awful candidate Harris was and still is.