Kamala celebrates Independence Day with festival-goers in NOLA, drag queens at vice president’s residence

Kamala Harris traveled to New Orleans to the Essence Festival on Thursday. She participated in the Global Black Economic Forum at the Four Seasons as part of the festival’s activities. She berated the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, saying she felt “deep disappointment” and it is a denial of opportunity.

“It is in so very many ways a denial of opportunity,” Harris said of the ruling, while encouraging the audience to read the “brilliant” dissenting opinion written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, nominated by Biden to make good on his promise to put a black woman on the Supreme Court, as it turns out, is too political for her role as a Supreme Court justice. Her opinions often read as though a high school girl wrote them. Sorry. Not sorry. As noted, “she leans into political rhetoric when the law doesn’t take her side.” That is embarrassing, not something to applaud as “brilliant.”

“Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

So wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent to Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the affirmative action case in which the Supreme Court held that our nation’s constitutional prohibition of racial discrimination constitutionally prohibits racial discrimination.

Justice Jackson is not exactly wrong—it is simply that she is answering a question that nobody has asked her in any official capacity. What was at question in SFFA was not whether racial preference in admissions at elite universities is a necessary precondition for racial justice in these United States—though perhaps Ivy League practice is not the top priority of black families in, say, Chicago, where the Democrats will hold their 2024 national convention and where only 6 in 100 black students can do math at the appropriate grade level. Rather, as the court’s majority opinion put it, “The question presented is whether the admissions systems used by Harvard College and UNC are lawful under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The court rightly held that these practices are unlawful.

Joe Biden’s diversity nomination for the Supreme Court has not gotten off to a great start. Nonetheless, there Kamala was in New Orleans singing Jackson’s praises.

Essence Magazine has presented Essence Festival since 1995 in New Orleans, except for the year after Hurricane Katrina. It is described as “the preeminent experience of all things Black.” There were free workshops, discussions, fashion shows and other public events at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center through the weekend, concerts at the Caesars Superdome, food, business forums, and so on. Kamala also spoke at the festival on Friday on the subject of “reproductive health.” Abortion. It will be a big issue in the 2024 presidential election, you can count on that, just as it was in the 2022 mid-term elections. Democrats did well with it.

Kamala is the least popular vice president in history since polling on that question began. Yet, she hosted a Pride party at the vice president’s residence with her husband on Saturday. It is described as a “backyard soiree” in collaboration with GLAAD.

The Pride event was emceed by RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15 winner Sasha Colby, and featured a performance by actress Alex Newell, who sang, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” by Whitney Houston, according to a report by the Messenger.

Actors Ariana DeBose, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Rafael L. Silva, and Ronen Rubinstein, as well as dancer Frankie Grande, TV host Bobby Berk, YouTuber Jazz Jennings, and singers Dove Cameron, G Flip, and Brooke Eden were also in attendance.

I must be way out of the loop because the only name I recognize is that of Jazz Jennings, the Florida teen who transitioned in front of television cameras for several years, thanks to a stage mom and her supportive father. I covered that series for several seasons and it was a very depressing show to cover, as far as I was concerned.

During Pride Month, we celebrate the LGBTQI+ community, the promise of our country, and the heroes upon whose shoulders we stand as we continue the fight for equality. pic.twitter.com/m3Mg7mzPu1

— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) June 30, 2023

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was there.

Kamala told the audience that Pride is patriotic.

Pride is patriotism. pic.twitter.com/qT5ZtuGfJz

— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) July 1, 2023

Saturday was July 1. Couldn’t Kamala fit a Pride party into her busy schedule during the actual Pride Month? She can’t seem to get anything right, can she? That may be why she’s so unpopular.