President Joe Biden’s White House has begun to leak like a sieve, just as his approval ratings have plunged. Buried beneath a laundry list of leaks from the fighting factions within his administration is yet another entry in a quietly growing genre: outrage from the Oval Office about Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.
Over at the Washington Post, several unnamed administration officials have lambasted Becerra for his total invisibility amid the pandemic. Internal critics consider the “low profile” of Becerra “confounding,” the Post reports.
“They also said the health secretary isn’t fulfilling a core responsibility of his job, which is to act as a de facto field marshal coordinating the nation’s vast health bureaucracy to achieve the White House’s strategy, even though he does not set it,” the story continues. “For instance, they cited officials’ airing of differences over booster shots and COVID-19 isolation guidance as confusing and unnecessary.”
Becerra’s blunders were predictable enough. He was a token nominee, not in any way qualified for the job he was given. He had been California’s attorney general, but he had no expertise in public health.
Biden has remained curiously hell-bent on racial quotas. This meant cornering himself into picking the only black woman in the Senate as his running mate and choosing a Latino, literally any Latino with D next to his name, to lead whatever executive branch department remained available.
Presumably, the choice of Becerra, in particular, fell upon the perennially Way Too Online Ron Klain, who acts more like a prime minister than Biden’s chief of staff. In fitting fashion to flatter the ultra-woke Left, the only HHS adjacent experience Becerra had as the California attorney general was using his office to troll and terrorize proponents of religious liberty and the pro-life cause.
Becerra continued to attack the Little Sisters of the Poor over their religious objections to the ACA’s contraception mandate and, most infamously, he pressed felony charges against activists attempting to expose Planned Parenthood’s mishandling of aborted babies’ body parts — even the Los Angeles Times deemed Becerra’s crusade a “disturbing overreach.”
Better yet, Becerra polished off his anti-Trump bona fides with lawsuits against the former president’s administration to the tune of $41 million. So what if he didn’t have so much as a candy striping gig in his credentials? Becerra checked off all the boxes: He was the right kind of minority and the right kind of troll.
If only there weren’t this pandemic that would usually be a major responsibility of, you know, the Health and Human Services secretary.
