Senate Republicans say they’re worried Kamala Harris will allow in an unlimited number of immigrants, send grocery prices skyrocketing and generally doom America if she’s elected president.
But for those who got to know her during the now-vice president’s stint in the Senate, she’s also “smart,” “engaging” and “personable.”
“I always found her pleasant to deal with,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who overlapped with her on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds said he and Harris “got along fine” when they served on the Environment and Public Works panel. “We worked together well on the committee,” he said. “We still say hello to each other when we see each other.”
“We obviously disagreed on policy every day,” Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma told NOTUS, recalling that he traveled with her on an official trip to Afghanistan. “But she’s personable.”
Senators typically afford their colleagues more respect than members of the Wild West House of Representatives, even those with completely opposing political views. After all, they’re members of the same ultra-exclusive social club: The U.S. Senate.
They’ve sat through the same hearings, traveled on the same foreign trips, endured the same hallways crowded with reporters and shown up to the same late-night voting marathons.
They can almost always find something nice to say about each other. That commitment to collegiality is clear whether a senator is still serving or facing a confirmation hearing for a job in a new administration. Now, Harris’ race against Donald Trump shows that even a bitterly contested presidential campaign can’t overcome the Senate’s chumminess.
Even Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who first spent three minutes listing off his complaints about Harris’ approach to the southern border and her decision not to attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress last week, eventually landed on a fond memory.
“I did enjoy winning a World Series bet with her when the Astros beat the Dodgers,” Cruz told NOTUS on Thursday.
After the series, Harris showed up at Cruz’s office “with California red wine and See’s candy and wearing an Astros shirt.”
“That was particularly fun,” Cruz said.
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, said she was “very personable and knowledgeable” when they interacted. He said he liked chatting with her.
Elected in 2016, Harris didn’t get through a full six-year Senate term before moving on to the vice presidency in 2021. Still, she served on some high-profile committees, including the secretive Intelligence panel. Her Republican colleagues on that committee recognized her as a hard worker at the time: In 2019, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told BuzzFeed she was “engaged and active” and “absolutely” showed up to meetings prepared.
“I don’t remember any problems with her on the committee,” Rubio said last week, his earlier assessment unaltered by recent political events. He also recalled working alongside her on the Russia election interference investigation.
On the Judiciary Committee, Harris rose to national prominence for her questioning of Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused during the confirmation process of committing a sexual assault when he was a teenager.
Although Sen. Chuck Grassley — then the Judiciary chairman — said “he didn’t recall any major problems” working with Harris on the panel, he remembered being frustrated when Harris and her colleagues tried to adjourn the Kavanaugh hearing at the start of proceedings.
But Grassley said he “would agree” with his other colleagues’ assessments that she was engaged in the committee’s work.
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri told NOTUS he didn’t see her often after he started his term in 2019 because, at that point, she was spending much of her time in early caucus states while making her first bid for the White House. (That year, she once joked to a colleague that she was “fucking moving to Iowa.”)
“She was not very often at hearings,” Hawley said of that time period. And yet, even Hawley found something nice to say.
“My impression of her is that when I did see her at a hearing, I thought her questions were sharp,” he said.
Of course, even the camaraderie of the Senate couldn’t overcome everyone’s criticism. Sen. Ron Johnson told NOTUS he didn’t like her questions.
“She was often mean to witnesses,” Johnson said of the former prosecutor.
“She’s just a very aggressive questioner,” he added, citing a moment Harris compared immigrants’ perceptions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to how people in the 20th century viewed the Ku Klux Klan.
Johnson was not the only senator who criticized Harris. For all the warm sentiments about the vice president’s stint in the upper chamber, the political realities of the bruising election cycle ahead are clear too. As senators like Johnson boost Trump, they’re also prepared to tear Harris down.
A substantial number of Americans “think fairly or unfairly that the vice president is a ding-dong,” Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana told reporters on Thursday. “They think fairly or unfairly that if you gave the vice president a penny for her thoughts, she’d give back change. They think fairly or unfairly that she is a member of the loon wing of the Democratic Party.”
Ever the Oxford-educated lawyer, even as he indirectly attacked his former colleague, Kennedy wouldn’t say whether he thought those descriptions were fair.
“I’ve given you my assessment of the situation,” he said when pressed for his personal view. “I don’t have anything else to add.”
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Haley Byrd Wilt and Riley Rogerson are reporters at NOTUS.