Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, blasted Kamala Harris in a social media post Monday calling her a “DEI vice president,” using the acronym for “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs.
“The media propped up this president, lied to the American people for three years, and then dumped him for our DEI vice president,” Burchett said in a post on X.
He also referred to Harris as “a DEI hire” in a brief interview Monday, telling CNN that during the 2020 campaign then-candidate Joe Biden said “he was going to hire a Black female for vice president.”
“What about white females? What about any other group?” Burchett added.
Biden said during a March 2020 Democratic debate that he’d choose a female running mate, but did not mention race or ethnicity. Other top VP contenders at the time included Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
Biden announced Sunday that he was dropping his 2024 re-election bid. He endorsed Harris for president on the same day.
Burchett has previously cited DEI in disparaging Harris. During an an interview with Newsmax this month, he said: “When I hear her talk, I just scratch my head and think this is what DEI is really about. It clearly is. She checks all the boxes. She’ll say she’s of Indian descent one day, then she’ll say she’s of Black descent. It’s just box-checking.”
Harris is the first female and Black vice president. She is the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, with a résumé that includes being elected as San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general and a U.S. senator.
Burchett also used a DEI attack line during a heated House committee hearing Monday on the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. “You are a DEI horror story,” Burchett said at one point to Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle.
The jibe comes amid widespread accusations from conservatives that Cheatle, a 27-year veteran of the agency, was unqualified for the top job and that female agents on Trump’s Secret Service team were physically incapable of protecting him.
The comments directed at Cheatle follow a pattern from other recent news events where conservative lawmakers and pundits have cited DEI programs as a contributing factor in disasters as disparate as the Boeing-made airplane problems and the Baltimore bridge collapse.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, asked Cheatle during the hearing if the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump was “due to DEI or rather systemic failures in communication and potentially safety protocols.”
“The incident on the 13th has nothing to do with DEI,” Cheatle responded. “The incident on the 13th has to do with a failure or a gap either in planning or communication.”
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