Chutzpah (n): 1: Brazen impudence, gall, audacity.

2: Calling for your opponent's medical records after participating in a cover-up of presidential dementia.

Although neither the Oxford English Dictionary nor Merriam-Webster posts Kamala Harris' picture next to their entries for chutzpah, they may change their minds after this week. Harris released a letter from her doctor over the weekend attesting to her "physical and mental resiliency" as she runs for president. Having released the memo, Harris claimed that she had released her "medical records" in a brief interaction with her media pool, and insisted that Trump do the same. Not only did Harris make that demand, she claimed that his lack of "transparency" about his medical status made him "unfit for office."

Oh, really?

VP @KamalaHarris: "Today I released my medical records as has I believe every candidate for president of the United States except Donald Trump...It's just a further example of his lack of transparency...He is unfit for office." pic.twitter.com/baK7Sm8Iy1

— CSPAN (@cspan) October 13, 2024

Ahem. In the first place, Trump's medical status got a pretty thorough reading on July 13, after an assassin shot him in the ear and killed Corey Comperatore while wounding two others. Not only did the press report extensively on Trump's medical status, Trump demonstrated his stamina in real time after getting shot. Since then, Trump has outhustled Harris and Walz combined on the campaign trail, a point that even lefties are glumly conceding at this point. 

However, the real hypocrisy in this demand comes with Harris' comments about "fitness." For three years, Harris participated in a White House cover-up of Joe Biden's accelerating cognitive decline by lying constantly regarding Biden's fitness for office and for a second term. Until the presidential debate uncovered Biden's incapacity, Harris repeatedly claimed that Biden was robustly engaged in his presidency and fit to serve another four years -- when he couldn't even debate for 90 minutes on stage, and everyone knew it.

How far back did that cover-up go? Publicly, it goes back to April 2022 when the White House had the Easter Bunny block Biden from engaging reporters at the White House Easter Egg roll. The Wall Street Journal put the start of the cover-up even further back to October 2021, when Biden's cognitive issues flared in a heated debate over his signature legislative effort of the time:

President Biden had just finished trying to persuade a group of congressional Democrats to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill when Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, took the microphone.

In 30 minutes of remarks on Capitol Hill, Biden had spoken disjointedly and failed to make a concrete ask of lawmakers, according to Democrats in the room. After he left, a visibly frustrated Pelosi told the group she would articulate what Biden had been trying to say, one lawmaker said. 

“It was the first time I remember people pretty jarred by what they had seen,” recalled Rep. Dean Phillips (D., Minn.), who would go on to mount an unsuccessful primary challenge against the president. 

That was October 2021. That month was the last time Biden met with the House Democratic caucus on the Hill regarding legislation. 

That wasn't an isolated incident, either. Foreign leaders got a front-row look at Biden's cognition issues just a few months later:

In spring 2022, some European officials began to notice that something might be amiss. Biden was chairing an online video call on Ukraine with the G-7 leaders, a tightly scheduled discussion where Biden called on one leader at a time to give a statement. Sitting in the Oval Office, Biden at one point forgot to unmute his mic, then lost his train of thought and began mumbling, according to an official on the call. He appeared to lose the order of which leader should speak next, and then tried to end the call without calling on Macron. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau intervened to remind him, and Macron was given his turn.

That was about the same time that the White House assigned the Easter Bunny to be Biden's minder. 

For at least two solid years after that, the White House denied Biden had any problem at all. The media played along with it too, helpfully relaying as "fact" that Biden worked longer and harder than anyone else in the West Wing, based entirely on lies by the conspirators. To this day, the Protection Racket Media has refused to ask Harris about this cover-up or even to discuss it at all -- despite the historic dumping of an elected nominee at the last minute because of the cognitive impairment of an incumbent president.

Harris played a key role in this cover-up, and not just because she reportedly met with Biden twice a week as a matter of routine. The Vice President has a constitutional duty to act if the President is incapacitated enough to keep him from fulfilling his duties. Even a hint of this kind of cognitive impairment should have been brought to the attention of the Cabinet and leadership in Congress. Instead, Harris did nothing, or even worse than nothing by playing along with the cover-up and avoiding the real question Biden's mental status creates: Who's really in charge of the executive branch?

That's the question Harris won't answer, and it's the question the press refuses to ask. But that's the transparency we require as a means to preserve constitutional order. Until Harris provides that transparency, she has no standing whatsoever to demand any other.