VP Official Knew about #GIJustice
Until military civil rights are fully realized, Walz is just Harris' Token Vet
Vice President Kamala Harris should have known about military civil rights in 2023, and the largest Democratic caucus should have known as early as 2021. That’s because Andy Flick, the same staffer that worked with me in 2019 on the Congressional Research Service (CRS) query in May, and the six-Member Congressional Inquiry in November, became her Legislative Director before she became the presumptive Democratic nominee for President.
Chief of Staff
Andy Flick was the Chief of Staff for David Trone (MD-6) when I began working with my then-Representative as a resident of Frederick County, MD, in 2019. During a phone call on May 8th, Flick suggested Rep. Trone might succeed in convening a hearing on military civil rights with the House Committee on Education and Labor. To prepare for it, he asked me for questions to send to CRS about HCPA and VEVRAA;
No hearing was ever scheduled and, to my knowledge, nothing came of the CRS questions. But I know Flick received them;
Since the CRS falls outside FOIA, I may never know if Flick ever forwarded the questions in the first place. Let’s pretend he did, for the sake of argument. He reviewed the first draft of my Military Civil Rights Act (MCRA) and sent feedback, however myopic;
On November 14th, Flick shared a Tweet on Trone’s official profile publicly calling on other House members to co-sign a Letter bound for the Department of Justice. With my help, Flick and other staffers in Trone’s office managed to collect five more signatures for a letter to the Department of Justice. You can see the Tweet and the (unanswered) DoJ Inquiry on the GIJustice website.
Executive Director
Andy Flick left David Trone’s office as Chief of Staff in November 2021, when he was hired as the Executive Director of the New Democrat Coalition;
He was still a House Staffer, but he moved from Trone’s office to Rep. Suzan DelBene’s (D-WA), who was chair of the Caucus. In January 2023 DelBene was promoted to Chair of the DCCC, the sixth-ranking position among House Democrats. At that time, Rep. Anne Kuster (D-NH) became Flick’s new boss. Then in September, according to Legistorm, Flick got picked up by Vice President Kamala Harris to be her Legislative Affairs Director. According to his LinkedIn, he also serves President Joseph Biden as a Special Assistant, positions he remains in to this day;
VP Harris and #GIJustice
As I wrote in my last ☧ost, Harris has a troubling record on civil rights when it comes to military families. Not only did she fail to implement AB556 within the CA agency tasked with enforcing it, Harris also served on the Senate Judiciary Committee when Trone’s Inquiry was ignored by AG Barr and FBI Director Wray. She was elevated to the Committee, which oversees the Department of Justice, in January 2018. It would have been in her political interest to amplify a Republican snub of both a fellow Democrat, but also of 23 million soldiers, veterans, and Dependents. But she didn’t, despite her record as a kind of ‘enforcer’ in the Senate.
In hiring Flick in September 2023, Vice President Harris acquired a Staffer with the most experience on military civil rights in Congress. Whether he advertised his experience on GIJustice in the hiring process or not, Flick possessed it as Legislative Director for the Vice President of the United States. Flick’s experience should have helped his boss help military families by being in the room where decisions were being made that affected their everyday lives. That’s why the nomination of veteran (and fellow Redleg) Tim Walz to be her running mate feels especially tokenizing.
Token Vet, or voice for fellow veterans?
Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota spent over two decades in enlisted service before eventually entering politics. In my research into HCPA haters and VEVRAA discriminators, Minnesota hasn’t come up much. That tells me that Walz may have been shielded from the most blatant anti-military bias. As Governor, he may even be responsible for the more friendly environment in his state.
Harris’ selection of Walz is not reducible to just his military status, but it also can’t be ignored. She and Walz may both be equally oblivious to the Haters and Discriminators targeting military families, but Harris had direct and unimpeded access to this information through her Legislative Policy Director since September of 2023. As Uncle Ben taught us, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Until the millions of soldiers, veterans, and Dependents in America have the same rights as their civilian counterparts, Harris and Walz cannot shake the appearance that he is just her Token Vet friend.
