Vice President Kamala Harris likely will be the Democrats’ nominee for president, and that means Team Trump needs a new playbook. Based on her record, one thing is clear – on issue after issue, she’s a San Francisco radical, committed to an ideological agenda that sacrifices the values and concerns of middle America to her image of “what can be, unburdened by what has been.”
For instance, she’s been a supporter of open borders for more than a decade. As California’s attorney general, she opposed the Obama administration’s “Secure Communities” program, and issued a bulletin directing her state’s sheriffs to ignore ICE detainers. As a U.S. senator from California, she cosponsored the Dream Act, to provide amnesty for illegal aliens. And as a candidate for president in 2019, she supported free healthcare for illegal aliens, as if the magnet pulling immigrants north wasn’t strong enough already.
As vice president, Harris’ attitude toward illegal immigration has been even worse. Joe Biden tapped Harris to lead the U.S. response to challenges at the southwest border – to serve, in other words, as Biden’s border czar. Thereafter, illegal immigration exploded: According to official figures from Customs and Border Protection, 9.9 million illegal aliens have crossed into the United States since the Biden-Harris administration took office, yet she never bothered to speak with the Border Patrol Chief – neither the current chief, Jason Owens, nor his predecessor, Raul Ortiz.
It's not just illegal immigration, it’s the economy, too. Harris pushed hard for the passage of the Biden-Harris administration’s major spending packages, the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” – virtually all of which was financed by borrowed money, and which even liberal finance experts warned would be inflationary – and she cast the deciding vote for the deceptively-named “Inflation Reduction Act,” the projected costs of which have risen to more than $1 trillion. These bills helped spur the worst inflation in 40 years. Since the onset of the Biden-Harris inflation, prices are up an astonishing 20.1 percent. Real wages haven’t kept pace, and Americans of all backgrounds are paying the price for the Biden-Harris administration’s policies.
Evidence that she’s a San Francisco radical abounds in the positions she took on a wide range of issues when she first ran for president back in 2019.
For instance, the nonpartisan GovTrack website ranked her “most liberal compared to All Senators” – that’s right, more liberal even than Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren – in the year she launched her presidential campaign. Continued GovTrack: Harris “joined bipartisan bills the least often compared to Senate Democrats.” (Interestingly, the website apparently removed the page naming Harris “most liberal” sometime after it became clear Harris was the likely Democrat nominee.)
In April of 2019, Harris signed on as a cosponsor of Sanders’ “Medicare for All” health insurance proposal, which would have eliminated the health care plans of the roughly 200 million Americans who have private health insurance coverage.
She’s such a strong proponent of destructive limits on American energy production that she insisted she would destroy one of the foundations of the Senate – the filibuster – in pursuit of her radical “green” agenda. She also said she would ban fracking and offshore drilling.
She’s all for threatening to use the coercive power of the state to silence political opponents. Who can forget her demands, as California’s attorney general, for donor lists from the conservative Americans for Prosperity Foundation – the kind of information that had, in previous cases, been illegally leaked, to better allow for harassment of conservative donors?
As a district attorney, attorney general, and U.S. senator, Harris has long championed radical change in the criminal justice arena. Running for president, she called for an end to what she called the “unjust and broken” cash bail system, saying it “disproportionately harms people from low-income communities and communities of color.” And in the wake of the summer 2020 riots, she supported the “Minnesota Freedom Fund,” a bail fund that assisted violent criminals who wanted out of prison. “If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota,” she posted to Twitter (now X). That bail fund used some of its funds to bail out George Howard, who, out on bail, shot and killed another man.
Perhaps nothing better demonstrates Harris’ San Francisco radical views than an action she took in early 2004, just four months after being sworn in as San Francisco’s district attorney, when a gang member gunned down undercover police officer Isaac Espinoza. Rather than seek the death penalty for the murder of a peace officer, as California law allowed, she declined to charge the perpetrator with a capital offense – and then failed to inform the victim’s widow of her decision before announcing it at a press conference. California’s senior U.S. senator at the time, Dianne Feinstein, giving a eulogy for the fallen officer, blasted Harris’ decision, asserting, “This is not only the definition of tragedy, it’s the special circumstance called for by the death penalty law.” The San Francisco Police Officers Association never endorsed Harris after that.
Kamala Harris supports open borders; taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal aliens; amnesty; more government spending; higher taxes; and a one-size-fits-all government healthcare program for everyone. She opposes donor confidentiality; the death penalty, even for cop killers; and fracking, offshore drilling, and fossil fuels in general.
If that’s not a San Francisco radical, I don’t know what is.
Jenny Beth Martin is President of Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund.