Kamala Harris Hosted a Women Senators Dinner, But Who Was It For?

But as Politico also reported, these self-conscious displays of bonding have a way of falling apart when the women’s actual jobs—politics—got in the way. They were strained during the aggressive campaign against Susan Collins’s re-election, which largely hinged on the Maine senator’s vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, as well as when four Democratic senators ran against each other for president in 2020. A Republican source noted that there was an “unofficial pact” at one point that the women attending these dinners wouldn’t campaign against each other too aggressively—which seems impossible considering the tenor of the moment, in which, to cite a recent example, Senator Marsha Blackburn is blaming Anthony Fauci for colluding with “big tech” to lie about the pandemic.

Certainly, when Blackburn said that Black Lives Matter was a non-profit run by trained Marxists just a short year ago, it was impossible to imagine her sitting down for a nice meal at the same table as Kamala Harris and eating some appetizers that Harris had cooked herself. And yet, particularly in the Biden Administration, bent as it is on unity and aisle-reaching and concession in the wake of an election that was nearly delegitimized by a ravenous power grab by the GOP, politics as usual must go on. You could consider it progress, I suppose, if progress means spending a single evening pretending that Democrats won’t continue to politely cede to Republicans, who in turn will continue their business of laughably framing the Democratic establishment as a socialist conspiracy and refusing to cede a single point.

And for Harris, whose ascendency to the office has often been framed around issues of representation, rebooting an event centered around pure identity, free of any relevant context, is the obvious play. It seems somewhat unlikely that the pageantry of feminist solidarity displayed here is going to change legislation or bring women who deeply oppose each other together; it’s hard to imagine an expertly plated dish of mahi-mahi changing anyone’s ideas about immigration or whether covid-19 was an inside job, which isn’t even to mention the looming fight over voting rights that is widely considered an attempt to forcefully secure a Republican president in four years.

And besides, the event has been expressly framed, by Democrats and Republicans, as an apolitical event where women can “break bread” without discussing their policies. But of course, it’s political, and it brings women together in one specific way: By pointing out to their constituents that they’re women, doing a job, and by providing a whole bunch of photographic evidence to the public that in the face of pressing material issues that will determine the fate of the country, they’re all trying very hard to get along.