The single best thing to be said about Joe Biden nominating Xavier Becerra to become his Health and Human Services secretary is that it immediately takes the Californian out of the running to fill Kamala Harris’s Senate seat. The only other good thing is that Becerra is such an objectionable pick that it will require Republicans little political capital to obliterate his nomination should they retain the Senate.
The president-elect’s early staffing choices have mostly fit Biden’s brand of interventionist, fiscally liberal establishmentarianism. With his close ally Chris Coons already serving as Biden’s Senate envoy to grease the wheels of the congressional deadlock, Republicans will feel the pressure not to overplay their hands in nuking Biden’s more tempered nominees. Luckily for Republicans, Becerra presents an easy target against whom they can flex their power with little political capital lost. It also takes one of the worst potential replacements for Harris’s seat out of the running, a possibility far more terrifying than a Cabinet nomination.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has unilateral power to pick the vice president-elect’s replacement. While Alex Padilla has been touted as the frontrunner, and Newsom allies are publicly lobbying him to pick a black woman, Becerra too was named as a top candidate in the race. Given that Newsom has to pick soon, Becerra has been effectively ruled out of the Senate selection pool, even if Republicans succeed in blocking his confirmation, as they very likely will.
And why? Republicans simply couldn’t create a better left-wing bogeyman specifically to replace Harris if they tried. Becerra, who currently serves as Harris’s previous job of California’s attorney general, is as much a corrupt cop crusading against religious liberties as Harris herself was one crusading against nonviolent drug offenders and sex workers.
For starters, Becerra has zero qualifications in public health, and, given his relentless culture war signaling not just against President Trump (Becerra has issued over 100 lawsuits against his administration) and against religious liberty, his nomination seems more like vice signaling from the Biden camp. According to the New York Times, health experts friendly with the Biden team were “unhappily” taken aback by the choice. This alone will provide grounds for even Democrats tepid about religious liberty and abortion issues to oppose him. But Becerra’s political weaponization of his office makes this an easy slam dunk, so long as Republicans have the stones to pick their battles and fight like hell to win them.
Escalating Harris’s war on pro-lifers, Becerra has spearheaded the criminal prosecution of two pro-life leaders from the Center for Medical Progress. Even the Los Angeles Times considered this political persecution a “disturbing overreach.” Becerra also defended a California law forcing pro-life crisis pregnancy centers to offer information about abortion options, which Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas all successfully voted to overturn. Most notable are Becerra’s continued legal attacks on the Little Sisters of the Poor, who have spent more than half a decade now fighting for a religious exemption to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate.
Republicans may have to put up with war hawks and casually corrupt swamp monsters, but Becerra is beyond the pale. He is neither qualified by the merits nor by the political standards to which the Senate must provide their consent. Should they maintain the Senate, as long as Republicans hold the line, Biden’s gambit could wind up saving the country from Becerra being brought to national power with both his Senate and Cabinet prospects rendered moot.
