Brian Fallon, executive director of the progressive group Demand Justice, will soon join the Biden-Harris campaign as communications director for the vice president.
The Washington Post was first to report the news, and normally staffing moves don’t drive headlines, except that Fallon has been a consistently aggressive critic of the White House in recent years, a progressive operative unafraid to ruffle feathers while trying to push Biden further left.
“We always bring a butter knife to a gunfight,” Fallon complained of Democrats during an interview with Vanity Fair last year. He preferred a heavy hand and a hacksaw.
It was Fallon and Demand Justice who called on Biden to expand the number of seats on the Supreme Court to counter the conservative majority. And later, they mounted a pressure campaign to convince liberal Justice Stephen Breyer to retire so that the president could name a younger, more progressive replacement. The White House explicitly disapproved of both measures.
“I think if we start the process of trying to expand the court, we are going to politicize it, maybe forever, in a way that is not healthy,” Biden said of adding justices to the bench.
The White House was similarly dismissive of the pressure campaign led by Fallon to get Breyer to leave the court, an effort that included hiring a box van with a billboard to circle the Supreme Court for hours on end at the beginning of last year. Its blunt message read, “Breyer retire.” According to Jen Psaki, Biden’s press secretary at the time, the president believed the justice could “make his own decision.”
Fallon also publicly supported defunding the police, something that the White House insists they adamantly oppose. All the same, Republicans were busy Tuesday morning digging through old tweets from Fallon, and the Republican National Committee unearthed a three-word post the operative made in 2020. It read, “Defund the police.”
His hiring was more evidence, RNC spokeswoman Anna Kelly told RealClearPolitics, that “Democrats will continue to put criminals first and law enforcement last.”
Fallon also frustrated some Democrats when he said in June 2021 that infrastructure was “up in the air” and suggested that voting reform should instead be the top priority. At the time, Ben LaBolt, who later became White House communications director, told RCP that the idea was “completely nuts.”
“There tends to be a direct relationship,” a bristling Biden campaign aide told RCP at the time, “between how wildly and demonstrably off base certain Democratic [strategists] have been about American politics over the last half decade, and how much advice they have now for the leader who’s gotten the most right during that period.”
But those gripes have now been buried. Democrats see Donald Trump at the gates, and with the former president poised to win the GOP nomination, the Biden campaign drafted the gadfly. The campaign isn’t concerned that Fallon’s hiring signals any kind of softening on progressive issues, such as expanding the Supreme Court or defunding the police, given Biden’s previous comments.
Fallon wasn’t entirely at odds with the administration either. While he helmed Demand Justice, the group made diversifying the federal bench a key priority. They were enthusiastic supporters of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first black judge to sit on the high court, and they praised Biden for “shattering records for diversity on the court.”
Fallon, who declined to comment on the record, will soon row in the same direction as the White House. His hiring comes at a moment of increased scrutiny for the vice president.
A vice presidential campaign generally serves as a team of alternates. Compared to the top of the ticket, a VP doesn’t get most of the spotlight. This may change in 2024, thanks to Republicans. For instance, former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley often warns GOP voters that “a vote for President Biden is a vote for Kamala Harris.”
Regardless of circumstances, the Biden campaign is happy to have him. “Brian brings a wealth of expertise and knowledge on the issues that matter most to the American people,” Sheila Nix, the VP’s campaign chief of staff, said in a statement. “We’re thrilled to have him join the team, and know he will be a huge asset to reelecting President Biden and Vice President Harris.”
