Vice President JD Vance revealed that former Vice President Kamala Harris actually refused to allow his wife and children to tour the Naval Observatory residence before inauguration, breaking decades of established protocol between outgoing and incoming vice presidents.
Maybe she’d run out of vodka? Vance’s rivalry with Harris has a history of snubs, digs, and fights… including when Vance suggested that his Democratic opponent had “four shots of vodka before every meeting.”
Vance disclosed the details of the residential snub scandal during his appearance on the debut episode of The Katie Miller Podcast on Monday, explaining how Harris denied his three young children the customary opportunity to see their future home before moving in.
“I think that, normally, it’s customary for the outgoing vice president to show the incoming vice president’s family the house,” Vance said. “We have three little kids, so I guess at the time our kids were, like, 7, 5, and—you know—2. I guess Mirabel turned 3 right before the inauguration.”
The denial particularly frustrated Vance’s wife, Usha, who wanted to prepare their children for the transition to their new home.
“Usha really wanted to show [the children where they would be living], so what we actually proposed is—recognizing the weirdness of the politics—can Usha take the kids over and just show them where they’re going to be living for the next four years? And they were rebuffed,” Vance explained.
CBS News reported on rumors in January that Harris refused to extend an invitation for a formal sit-down or tour to the Vance family. When the Vances moved into the white Queen Anne-style mansion on January 20, it marked their first time inside the residence that has housed vice presidents since the 1970s.
The rebuff began in November when Usha Vance, through intermediaries, reached out to staff for Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff seeking details about childproofing the residence. The Vance children — Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel — are all under eight years old. A Harris political appointee initially rebuffed these questions.
Navy officials eventually provided an overview of the house before Christmas to discuss layout, logistics and move-in practicalities. Usha Vance also spoke with Emhoff for about 40 minutes in January, according to sources. Harris sources claimed arrangements were underway to accommodate the Vance children, but no formal invitation ever materialized.
Without access to tour the actual residence, the Vance family was forced to use photographs to get their children ready to move into their future home.
“A friend of ours in Cincinnati had a book about the vice president’s residence, and so we would show the kids what it would look like, but that’s as close as they ever got to it,” Vance said.
Harris’s decision broke with longstanding tradition. In 2016, then-Vice President Biden and his wife Jill hosted Mike Pence’s family at the Northwest Washington residence shortly after the election.
“We’re just very grateful for the hospitality today of the vice president and second lady,” Pence said at the time.
Pence had formerly offered Harris and Emhoff a chance to visit during the waning days of the Trump administration. No formal sit-down between Pence and Harris ever occurred, according to both Democratic and Republican sources.
The residence snub escalated an already bitter rivalry between Vance and Harris that reached new heights when Vance openly accused the Democrat of drinking on the job — a longtime rumor that has followed Harris for years.
During an interview, Vance joked that Harris was probably abusing alcohol.
“Well, I don’t have four shots of vodka before every meeting,” Vance laughed when asked about differences between his approach and Harris’s.
“That’s one way that I think Kamala really tried to bring herself into the role, is these word salads, and I think that I would need the help of a lot of alcohol to answer a question like Kamala Harris answered a question,” he said.