Vice President Kamala Harris denies people within the White House are trying to undermine her. Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, host Margaret Brennan asked Harris about gossip that she is being set up to fail. Harris responded: “No, I don’t believe I’m being set up to fail. I’m vice president of the United States. Anything that I handle is because it’s a tough issue, and it couldn’t be handled at some other level.”

A critic might suggest her statement means that what she has been assigned to do — most importantly to fix the border problem — can’t be handled at the level of the president. That’s probably not what she meant, but how else to decode her statement? A vice president is not independent of a president and must carry out his wishes. If the border isn’t being secured, if other projects assigned to her are failing (and what are they?), the buck stops with the president.

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Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ new book “America’s Expiration Date: The Fall of Empires and Superpowers and the Future of the United States” (HarperCollins/Zondervan).

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