Texas state representative Brian Harrison served as deputy chief of staff and chief of staff in the Department of Health and Human Services during the Trump administration.
After seeing today’s Corner post about the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that sounds an awful lot like a sales pitch for Kamala Harris, Harrison writes in: “I’m proud to have served as chief of staff of HHS under President Trump, and it’s infuriating to see my former agency’s lawlessness under the leadership of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, who have completely politicized HHS and America’s public health agencies. It is possible this email crosses the line by using taxpayer funds for political propaganda.”
The Hatch Act does not apply to the president or vice president. The problem is, you and I both know darn well that Joe Biden did not write and send that email all by himself. (Considering the state of the president that Noah and Michael discuss, it’s fair to wonder if Biden even looked at this message sent in his name.) If this is the standard, then every federal agency could write as many messages as it likes from Biden declaring how swell Harris is, protected by the fig leaf that the message doesn’t explicitly say “Vote for Kamala Harris.”
Federal employees who are covered by the Hatch Act helped distribute that email, and indisputably, this represents HHS officials using their “official authority or influence to interfere with or affect the result of an election.” The Hatch Act bars covered federal employees from using “any e-mail account or social media to distribute, send, or forward content that advocates for or against a partisan political party, candidate for partisan political office, or partisan political group.” It is impossible to argue that the HHS email does not advocate for a partisan political candidate, Kamala Harris.
Had the DNC or any other non-government institution sent out an email touting Harris breaking the tie on the Inflation Reduction Act, there would be no issue here. But this is coming from the federal government and was prepared and distributed at taxpayer expense.
There’s nothing wrong with HHS sending an email to Medicare recipients notifying them of changes to policies. I could even live with President Biden spiking the football and talking about how great the changes are. But the email making two separate references to Harris, and crediting her for the law’s passage, are clearly an effort to get recipients to feel warm fuzzies about Harris as early voting has started in Illinois, Minnesota, Mississippi, South Dakota, Vermont and Virginia.
Another reader, a doctor, writes in to point out that the Inflation Reduction Act had a substantial impact on Medicare Part D plans. Perhaps I should have been clearer. The point is not that the IRA and the Medicare changes have no connection to each other, the point was that Harris’s vote to break the tie has no clear connection to the alleged point of the email, which is “hey, here are the changes being made to Medicare Part D.”