Kamala Is NOT a Moderate

 

No, Kamala Harris Isn’t A ‘Moderate’ — She’s A Radical Threat To America

The media are spinning Kamala Harris as a 'centrist' and a 'moderate.' In reality, she's a leftist who could be one heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

By Joshua Lawson

AUGUST 12, 2020

Once Joe Biden named Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate for the upcoming 2020 election, it didn’t take long for the media to begin its latest attempt to gaslight Americans.

In the Associated Press announcement of Biden’s choice, AP writers Kathleen Ronayne and Will Weissert write approvingly of Harris’s “centrist record” as a contributing factor in the decision. Longtime political analyst and lobbyist Doug Schoen praised Biden’s pick while arguing Harris “could help Biden solidify his position among centrist voters and even moderate Republican voters.”

Not to be outdone, The New York Times characterized Harris as a “pragmatic moderate.” In an additional Harris announcement for the Times, Jonathan Martin and Astead W. Herndon refer to Harris and Biden as “two moderates” who share “center-left politics.”

Yet an analysis of Harris’s voting record in the U.S. Senate, as well as policies she has proposed, reveal quite a different story. Her positions form an agenda nearly entirely in lock-step with the radical leftist ideology that has taken over the Democratic Party. Indeed, if Biden wins the 2020 race for the White House, Sen. Harris (D-Calif.) will find herself in a unique position to pose a genuine threat to the values that built the United States of America.

According to a detailed assessment by Voteview, Harris holds a voting record farther left than 97 percent of Democrats in the 116th Senate, and more liberal than 99 percent of the Senate as a whole. Of current members of the U.S. Senate, Harris ranks more liberal than Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) while placing as the Democrat with the most liberal voting record in the chamber aside from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Harris has stated that illegal immigrants in the United States are not criminals — which defines both logic and traditional definitions of standard English words like “illegal” and “criminal” — and once likened U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to members of the Ku Klux Klan for having the temerity to enforce the law.

During a Democratic primary debate, Harris raised her hand in support of a government-run health-care plan that would have taxpayers covering illegal immigrants. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper in 2019, Harris made it clear that she would be “opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education or public health, period.”

Harris was a co-sponsor of the utterly insane Green New Deal, a co-sponsor to Sanders’s “Medicare For All” scheme to socialize America’s health-care system, and is on record advocating a repeal of the 2017 Republican tax cuts that helped create the conditions for the booming pre-pandemic American economy.

During her failed attempt to win the nomination, Harris promised if she were elected president, she wouldn’t hesitate to sign an executive order banning all “assault weapons” as well as “high-capacity magazines” — both designations left forebodingly undefined. As a district attorney in 2004, she even supported legislation that would require “microstamping” technology for all firearms, a proposal both problematic for its potential infringement on core Second Amendment rights as well as possible government exploitation.

In a CNN Town Hall in October, Harris emphatically stated that she is in favor of banning both fracking and offshore drilling. On the whole, Harris’s recently proposed energy policies veer far into the doomsday scenarios peddled by the radical left, accompanied by drastic “solutions.”

Her “Climate Plan For the People” advocated converting the entire nation to “100 percent carbon-neutral electricity” by 2030, and sought “all new buses, heavy-duty vehicles, and vehicle fleets will be zero-emission.” Like the Green New Deal she co-sponsored, Harris called for “all new buildings” to be “carbon-neutral.” Unsurprisingly, the estimated cost for these projects was not disclosed on Harris’s campaign website.

On abortion, Harris is anything but a moderate. She has gone so far as to propose a new “plan” that would, somehow, force states and localities to seek prior approval and clearance through the U.S. Department of Justice before placing any limits or “restrictions” on abortions.

Harris received a whopping 844 total votes in the entire 2020 Democratic Primary process, and, despite widespread support from powerful Democrats and media outlets alike, she just, well, never caught on. Her selection as Biden’s running-mate, however, gives her a chance to accomplish artificially what she and her backers never got even close to accomplishing organically. Simply put, this is a run-around by leftist Democrats to slink a favored candidate into the White House without having to win the Democratic primary contest let alone a national election at the top of the ticket.

While Biden hasn’t explicitly stated he would not run for a second term if he wins the 2020 presidential election, as David Axelrod notes, the fact that Biden would be 81 by the next election makes it “widely assumed” he would not run again. As such, a Biden victory vaults Harris into a position where Axelrod concedes she would immediately become the “heir apparent” and “putative frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination” in 2024.

Given Biden’s age — he would be 78 on Inauguration Day — the odds are far greater than normal that Harris may be called upon to fulfill the primary and solemn duty for which the vice presidency exists. In that case, by her own admission in her own statements and proposals, an America with Kamala Harris sitting behind the Resolute Desk would look quite different in a hurry and could usher in a slew of far-left proposals that would make Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” look like a clam bake.

Ultimately, Biden isn’t truly the candidate running to replace President Trump. The largest threat to everything America is, to its founding principles, and everything it represents at its best is no longer Sanders, it’s the Democratic Party’s new vice-presidential nominee.

This November, the election will give Americans a chance to reject the creeping extremism of the Democratic Party, which is now ostensibly led by its functional leftist leader Kamala Harris. Americans must see through the attempts of Democrats and the media to spin Harris’s radical leftist voting record into something “centrist” or “moderate,” recognize the threat she poses, and vote accordingly.

If enough do so, our nation may dodge a crippling blow. If not, we could be in for a rough decade.

Joshua Lawson is managing editor of The Federalist. He is a graduate of Queen's University as well as Hillsdale College where he received a master's degree in American politics and political philosophy. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaMLawson.