If media were doing their job and asking her tough questions, she’d be an enormous liability.
If media were doing their job and asking her tough questions, she’d be an enormous liability.
K amala Harris has come a long way since this time last year. In early October 2019, she was hovering at around 4 percent support among presidential-primary voters, lagging more than 20 points behind frontrunner Joe Biden. She ended her abysmal campaign, deeply in debt, less than two months later.
Helped along by Biden’s pledge to seek out a running mate with the proper skin tone and coveted XX chromosomes, Harris now finds herself within a breath of the presidency.
Whereas one year ago Harris was frantically doing everything in her power to remain relevant and keep her campaign in the public eye, today she seems to have received an official mandate to stay out of the spotlight. She’s done a couple of interviews with major networks since being chosen as Biden’s VP, and she’s answered questions from local news outlets while campaigning in swing states.
But it’s fairly clear that the Biden camp is keeping those interviews to a minimum and almost entirely preventing her from taking direct questions from the press who follow her around the country. As the nation prepares to hear from Harris at the vice-presidential debate, here are a few questions that she has yet to receive or, despite having received, has yet to answer satisfactorily.
She ought to be asked, first and foremost, about the series of authoritarian proposals she released over the course of her presidential campaign. What role, if any, will these policy ideas have in a Biden-Harris administration?
On immigration, for instance, Harris promised that, as president, she would use executive action alone to create a path to citizenship for millions of “Dreamers,” illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. Not only would she have drastically expanded Barack Obama’s DACA program to encompass far more people, but she also planned to use executive power to unilaterally “parole” all of them, essentially pretending that no violation of our immigration laws had occurred.
Unfortunately, immigration was not the only issue on which Harris warned that she’d take unconstitutional action as president if Congress didn’t accomplish the legislative agenda she desired. During a town hall in April 2019, Harris vowed that she’d give Congress 100 days “to get their act together and have the courage to pass reasonable gun-safety laws, and if they fail to do it, then I will take executive action.”
Does Harris still believe that Congress’s choice not to act on a particular issue — a choice that falls well within the parameters of its constitutional powers — confers on the executive branch the authority to do whatever it would like to ram through its policy preferences?
Harris has applied a similarly authoritarian bent to abortion policy. As a senator, she’s sponsored legislation that would override state restrictions on abortions in the last three months of pregnancy, well after fetal viability. But if Congress fails to send that radical bill to the White House, Harris has a plan for that, too: her proposed regime of “preclearance,” which would block any state laws that her Justice Department deems contrary to Roe v. Wade.
On this, she should be asked: Will a Biden-Harris administration enact a “preclearance” regime on abortion? Do you agree with the majority decisions in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, both of which affirmed the state’s interest in protecting the unborn later in pregnancy?
On nearly every policy issue, Harris has, either during her political career or her presidential campaign, taken a hardline progressive stance. She’s an unequivocal supporter of the radical, costly Green New Deal — in fact, she supports the bill so strongly that she said last fall she’d be willing to nuke the legislative filibuster to get it through.
“If [Congress fails] to act, as president of the United States, I am prepared to get rid of the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal,” she vowed.
Harris backs publicly funded health care for illegal immigrants, and, though in recent weeks she has refused to answer whether she still supports packing the Supreme Court, she said in March of last year that she was open to it: “We are on the verge of a crisis of confidence in the Supreme Court. We have to take this challenge head on, and everything is on the table to do that.”
As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Harris has repeatedly suggested that Catholic nominees ought to be disqualified from serving on the bench because of their religious views. As attorney general of California, she was entangled with pro-abortion groups, allowed one of them to help draft a law compelling crisis-pregnancy centers to advertise for abortion, and used her office to target pro-life whistleblowers. Far from being a progressive prosecutor, Harris “fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.”
About all of these positions, Harris should be held to account and undergo rigorous scrutiny as to whether her views will imbue White House policy. Finally, Harris ought to be asked whether she still believes that Biden was wrong to fraternize with segregationists, whether she continues to consider his racial-justice record a failure, and whether having joined Biden’s campaign has eliminated her previous sympathy for the women who’ve accused him of sexual misconduct.
It isn’t difficult to see why Biden’s campaign would view Harris as a valuable addition to the ticket. But if media were doing their job and asking her tough questions, she’d also be an enormous liability.