by Natalia Mittelstadt
Vice President Kamala Harris has held very liberal – some would even say radical – positions on various policies over the years, and despite flip-flopping on occasion as political winds changed, her history indicates how far to the left her possible administration could swing.
From guns to energy, Harris has held liberal positions over the course of her political career. Some of her stated positions from her dismal 2020 presidential run have softened recently, largely occurring after she joined President Biden’s ticket in 2020.
Biden, who was the presumptive Democratic nominee for president this year, dropped out of the presidential race on July 21, after he was diagnosed with COVID-19 and had been facing calls to drop out from members of his own party following his debate against former President Donald Trump in June. The president later endorsed Harris for the Democratic nomination.
Harris is now the sole Democratic nominee for president.
John McLaughlin, a Trump pollster, told the “John Solomon Reports” podcast on Monday that Harris is “more radical than Biden. And the other part, when voters are asked about her, they tell us that she’s incompetent, she’s unqualified, and she’s a phony. She’s a fool. So instead of saying she’s dangerously liberal, I would say she’s foolishly liberal, because the one thing that makes being president different than any other elected offices, you can’t be a fool. You are the leader of the free world.”
GovTrack’s original 2019 report card on then-Sen. Harris said she was the most liberal senator that year. However, and not without controversy, GovTrack deleted the report card but noting that the organization’s more recent ranking from 2021 labeled her “the leftmost Democratic senator.”
Here are the top 10 most liberal positions that Harris has held:
1. Black Lives Matter rioters and criminal justice
Following the death of George Floyd, Harris shared on social media the Minnesota Freedom Fund in June 2020 amid the Black Lives Matter riots. The fund gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to free a twice convicted rapist and a woman charged with stabbing her friend to death. Of the more than $41 million raised by the fund, only a fraction of it was used to free rioters.
Harris called for ending the cash bail system during her 2020 presidential campaign.
2. Healthcare
Harris was an original co-sponsor of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) “Medicare for All” legislation in 2019. She echoed claims that Sanders’ bill allowed “supplemental” plans and therefore didn’t eliminate private insurance. Then Harris released her own Medicare for All plan where there would be a 10-year transition period to Medicare for All while allowing private insurance plans to continue.
3. Energy and The Green New Deal
Harris introduced the Green New Deal legislation with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in 2020. The measure could have cost up to $93 trillion, according to the American Action Forum. The Heritage Foundation estimated that the Green New Deal would wipe out more than 5.2 million jobs by 2040 at a peak employment shortfall.
She also co-sponsored a ban on offshore drilling in 2017.
During the 2020 presidential race, Harris said she supported banning plastic straws and reducing the consumption of red meat nationwide.
She also said in 2019 that she supported banning fracking. However, since joining Biden’s campaign in 2020, she has reversed that stance, and in an about-face, Harris’s campaign said last week that she doesn’t support bans on fracking.
4. Gun control
In 2019, Harris said that in her first 100 days as president, she would take executive action to ban imports of AR-15 rifles. The Washington Post reported that in fact, soon after Obama’s election, domestic production of semiautomatic rifles surpassed the previous year by nearly 60 percent. According to Statistica, most of the more than 20 million AR-15 rifles in the U.S. have been made domestically.
During the 2020 presidential race, she also supported a ban on new sales of assault weapons and a mandatory buyback program for confiscating Americans’ assault weapons.
In the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller case, Harris filed an amicus brief as the San Francisco district attorney, arguing that there is not a broad constitutional right to gun ownership.
5. Immigration and open borders
During a 2018 Senate confirmation hearing for Ronald Vitiello to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), after asking Vitiello about the Ku Klux Klan, Harris asked whether there were parallels between perceptions of ICE and the KKK. Vitiello said he didn’t see any parallels.
In 2018, Harris said, “I think there’s no question that we’ve got to critically re-examine ICE, and its role, and the way that it is being administered, and the work it is doing. And we need to probably think about starting from scratch.” However, Harris’s spokesperson later said that the then-senator was considering “a complete overhaul of the agency, mission, culture, operations.”
Harris was named – albeit euphemistically – as Biden’s border czar in March 2021. Nomenclature aside, she was assigned the task of resolving root causes of the border crisis. Last week, the GOP-led House, including six Democrats, passed a resolution “strongly condemning” Harris for her performance as the “border czar.” The House resolution noted that there have been 9.7 million illegal immigrant encounters nationwide since January 2021.
6. Abortion
When she ran in the 2020 presidential race, Harris criticized Biden’s campaign’s position supporting the Hyde Amendment, which prevents most federal funding of abortion. However, Biden had said he changed his mind and no longer supported the amendment.
Harris is believed to be the first sitting VP to visit an abortion clinic, which she did in Minnesota in March. As a senator, Harris, along with more than two dozen other senators co-sponsored the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have created a national right to abortion.
7. Student loan forgiveness
While running for president in the 2020 race, Harris promoted a student-debt forgiveness plan in 2019 as part of investing in Historically Black Colleges and Universities and black entrepreneurs. Her plan allowed up to $20,000 of student loans to be forgiven for borrowers who received a Pell Grant if they started and operated a business for a minimum of three years in a disadvantaged community.
Later, Harris endorsed Biden’s plant that canceled up to $10,000 of federal student loan debt per borrower.
8. Supreme Court packing
In 2019, Harris said that if she was elected president, she would be open to increasing the number of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We are on the verge of a crisis of confidence in the Supreme Court,” Harris said at the time. “We have to take this challenge head on, and everything is on the table to do that.”
On Monday, Biden released details of his proposal for changes to the Supreme Court, which called for Congress to establish term limits and an ethics code for the court’s nine justices. Harris endorsed the proposal, which didn’t recommend adding justices to the high court.
9. LGBTQ+ rights
Harris’s 2020 presidential election campaign’s website said that, as president, she would “[r]educe incarceration of LGBTQ+ individuals.”
The website added that she would “[e]stablish a Chief Advocate for LGBTQ+ Affairs in the White House.” When Harris was California attorney general, she refused to defend Proposition 8, which was a ballot initiative outlawing gay marriage that Californians passed with over 52% of the vote.
Earlier this month, the White House came under fire from transgender activists after a spokesperson said that the Biden-Harris administration opposes gender transition surgeries for children. After backlash from LGBTQ+ community demanding affirmation of gender transitions for children, the administration backpedaled and clarified that it did, in fact, support the invasive surgeries for children, according to The Advocate.
10. Inflation
Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate for the first COVID-19 stimulus package in 2021 which led to rampant inflation. The $1.9 trillion stimulus package resulted in the U.S. inflation rate jumping from 1.4% in 2020 to 7% in 2021.
She also echoed Biden’s State of the Union address in 2022, saying that the record-high gas prices are the “price to pay for democracy” as the U.S. continued to provide billions of dollars in military support for Ukraine following Russia’s invasion. The U.S. State Department estimates that U.S. taxpayers have provided more than $57 billion in military aid since to Ukraine since 2022.
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Natalia Mittelstadt is a reporter for Just the News.
Photo “Kamala Harris” by Kamala Harris.
