The following comes from a Dec. 27 story in the Washington Examiner.

Potential Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., hasn’t responded to an invitation to plunge into a pool of ice water to raise money for the D.C. Special Olympics in February.

She was publicly invited to attend last week by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic charity group she recently criticized as extreme. The 136-year-old group invited Harris and Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, to participate in the popular D.C. fundraiser after the senators described the organization earlier this month as having “extreme positions” and having “opposed a woman’s right to choose.”

In a Dec. 22 letter to the senators, the Knights of Columbus’s Capitol Hill chapter defended the organization and extended an invitation for Harris and Hirono to get involved in its charitable activities.

The Knights of Columbus came under fire from Harris and Hirono in questions they sent to federal court judicial nominee Brian Buescher in early December. Hirono claimed the organization, which Buescher has belonged to since he was 18, “has taken a number of extreme positions,” such as opposing gay marriage in 2008.

Harris quizzed Buescher on whether he agreed with Knight’s of Columbus’s leader’s opposition to abortion and asked if Buescher was “aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?”