The House speaker found an odd way to make “small talk” with the vice president at the State of the Union address.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had an unusual question for Vice President Kamala Harris as he made “small talk” with her at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday night.
“I asked her if her parents had been alive, did they survive to see her serving as vice president, and she lamented that they had not,” he told Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Harris’ mother, cancer researcher Shyamala Gopalan, died in 2009. Her father, retired economics professor Donald Harris, is very much alive, although the vice president has said the two are not close.
Johnson noted that the two had a lot of time to chat as Biden frequently stopped to greet lawmakers as he made his way to the rostrum.
But his choice of question for that moment left many of his critics perplexed: