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Gail Collins: Bret, Kamala Harris sure seems proud of her gun ownership, doesn’t she?
Bret Stephens: Think of Aretha Franklin singing, “G-L-O-C-K (E), find out what it means to me.”
Gail: Hadn’t thought about it until she told Oprah Winfrey that if someone breaks into her house, “they’re getting shot.” What do you think?
Bret: Well, Harris lives in the heavily guarded Washington Naval Observatory, so you kinda expect intruders would not fare well. But assuming she intends to be the one doing the shooting, that’s fine by me. And it sends a smart political signal that she is not some crunchy-granola liberal who believes that guns are intrinsically evil.
Gail: Guess that was the idea.
Bret: It also represents a recent trend in which firearms are starting to become more popular among Democratic-leaning voters, including women. Do you see this as positive?
Gail: Um, no. In a perfect world, I’d ban handguns altogether. The chances that one stored in the home will be misused, often by kids with fatal results, are high.
Bret: A good way to address misuse is to require gun owners to take out gun-liability insurance. Just like with cars, it makes for responsible ownership. Sorry, you were saying?
Gail: I guess Harris’s enthusiasm for the Glock in her home might give her more credibility when it comes to banning assault weapons and requiring universal background checks for gun purchases, both of which she supports.
So politically her story is probably a plus. Personally, it gives me the creeps.
Bret: Switching topics: Gail, any thoughts on Harris’s media tour?
Gail: Seemed to go pretty well. No signs that she’s going to be a sensational presidential conversationalist, but she seemed pleasant, well prepared and not nuts — unlike some candidates I could mention.
What did you think?
Bret: I’m glad she put herself out in front of at least one real journalist, Bill Whitaker of “60 Minutes,” who pitched no softballs and didn’t let her off the hook when she tried to evade certain questions, as she so often does.
Gail: Well, sometimes does.
Bret: On the other hand, I can’t believe she had no real answer to a question about what she’d do differently from President Biden, when he’s one of the most unpopular incumbents in recent history. And she generally gives the impression of someone who is either trying to hide her real views or hide the fact that she doesn’t have real views.
She’s just not a great candidate, which was my worry about her all along. And I sense she isn’t closing the sale. At this point, we should assume that Donald Trump has a secret three- or even four-percentage-point advantage in the states that the polls are missing, just as they did when he ran in 2016 and 2020.
Gail: You sure know how to ruin a person’s week.
Bret: I aim to displease.
Gail: Have to admit I’m worried about the apparent lack of enthusiasm among Black and Hispanic men. Barack Obama did a good job tackling that problem in a recent speech, but we need a lot more politicians and celebrities to speak out. Enthusiastically.
Bret: Maybe Harris should do more to help herself. She has two big problems: A lot of voters, including me, fear she isn’t really up to the job, which could be the reason she’s mostly avoided tough interviews.
Gail: Hey, she’s getting better at that.
Bret: If you say so. She also hasn’t really articulated why she wants the job or what she means to do as president, other than to be a kind of consensus seeker. My advice — and I realize she’s not asking for my advice — is a town-hall event in front of an audience of undecided voters that dispels this impression and offers her vision for the country. That would be a good place to start, assuming that vision is more than just a list of wan liberal talking points and vague references to “my plan.”
Gail: Fine by me, and I think she would rise to the occasion. But I do worry that Harris won’t have the coattails to bring in a Democratic-controlled Senate. Or even a sane Republican-controlled Senate.
Any races you’re watching in particular?
Bret: I really don’t want to see Bernie Moreno as Ohio’s next senator.
Gail: Ah, yes, the wealthy businessman. The Republican Party sure does have a bunch of them. I’m enthusiastic about the Democratic incumbent, Sherrod Brown.
Bret: My favorite Senate Democrat on a purely personal level. On the other hand, I admire Dave McCormick, the outstanding Republican candidate in Pennsylvania, who’d be a credit to the Senate.
Gail: Yow, McCormick — that’s Pennsylvania again. Think how much power we’d have if we moved to Philadelphia.
Bret: That race keeps getting tighter, and the incumbent, Bob Casey, can’t seem to stay above 50 percent. If Trump wins the state, as I’m beginning to think he will, that seat may also flip. Also, if we moved to Philly, I may have to rethink this whole “I’m too cool to vote” thing I’ve got going.
How about you? What Senate races are you looking at?
Gail: Very pleased that Ruben Gallego, the Democratic Senate candidate in Arizona, appears well ahead in his race with the deeply strange Kari Lake, who still won’t concede that she lost the governor’s race two years ago.
Bret: Deeply strange or just deeply awful? I guess she could be both, like Marjorie Taylor “They can control the weather” Greene.
As we both know, controlling the weather is easy when you have the Rothschild space lasers near to hand.
Gail: Very concerned that Colin Allred is struggling in his race against Senator Ted Cruz. Texas, come on!
Bret: I like Gallego, a veteran of the war in Iraq whose progressive politics are far from mine but would be a smart, significant, interesting voice in the Senate. In Texas, it looks like Cruz is going to win, which is a shame because he would be perfect as the new voice for Maxime Le Mal in the next installment of “Despicable Me.”
Oh, and since we’re speaking of the Senate, what do you think of getting rid of the filibuster?
Gail: Well, as a cynic, I’d say it depends on which party’s in charge. If Trump — shudder — wins and the Republicans take control of the Senate, I suspect I’d be happy with anything that slows down the agenda. But long term, I’ve never thought it was really fair to give the party that elected fewer senators the power to just close everything down.
How about you?
Bret: You’ve basically explained why I’m against getting rid of the filibuster: Like it or not, the party to which you don’t belong is going to have a majority, now or sometime in the future, and the filibuster is a very useful curb on its power. It also preserves the Senate’s role as a check on the often mindlessly majoritarian impulses of the House.
Gail: I hear you, but doesn’t that sound like trying to make sure the people’s choice doesn’t have the power to do much?
Bret: To me, that’s mostly the point.
The other big idea in terms of fixing our institutions is a term-limited Supreme Court, for which our colleague David French recently made a powerful case — while opposing court packing. Thoughts on that?
Gail: I do like that idea. The theory is that lifetime tenure helps the justices rise above partisan politics, but in most cases that just isn’t true. And a jurist who has a fixed 12- or 18-year term isn’t going to be much more vulnerable to political pressures than the people we have now, who aren’t worried about getting new jobs but are, in many cases, very interested in getting invited on really cool vacations, helping their kin move up in the world and so on.
I guess I don’t believe lifetime tenure is good for much of anything. Even the pope. How about you?
Bret: Especially the pope.
Gail: Yeah, it’s terrible that Pope Francis keeps insisting on sharing the wealth with the poor.
Bret: Or that he repeatedly sides with Russia against Ukraine.
Back to U.S. politics, I also don’t oppose limiting court tenures, though I think they should be long — 20 years or so. I also think any change to court tenures should be accompanied by a requirement for the Senate that any court vacancy be filled within 60 days, to avoid the sort of mischief we saw around Merrick Garland’s nomination to nowhere in 2016.
Gail: Yeah, under Mitch McConnell the Senate demonstrated how a majority leader just refusing to do anything can give a single politician the power to change the makeup of the court.
Bret: Completely agree.
And, before we go, I hope readers spend time with our colleague Carlos Lozada’s long and luminous Sunday essay in The Times on what it means to be an immigrant in the age of the Republican Party’s anti-immigrant demagoguery. Much like Carlos, who came with his family to the States from Peru, I spent my early years living between two countries that never quite felt entirely my own, in my case Mexico and the United States. I’d like to think that by having our feet planted in two cultures, two languages, two traditions, we did more to enrich American life than detract from it — just as all immigrants to America do, whether they’re from Norway or Nigeria, Holland or Haiti.
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