Kamala Harris Is a Threat to America

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, July 31, 2024

 

A week or so ago, the presidential election got less predictable — and more consequential.

 

For Kamala Harris, the newly anointed one, there is no part of the American system or compact that’s not up for grabs.

 

She favors packing the Supreme Court and vitiating or eliminating the Senate filibuster.

 

In other words, she wants to fundamentally alter two central institutions of the United States government to bring one to heel and to make the other better serve progressive ends. These aren’t 2019 positions. She endorsed Court-packing just days ago and was talking of shooting significant holes in the filibuster in 2022.

 

She revealed everything you need to know about her regard for checks on executive power during a 2020 primary debate. She laughed off the idea — defended by a Joe Biden then still demonstrating a vestigial institutionalism — that there might be constitutional limits on her ability to unilaterally impose gun-control measures.

 

It’s hard to imagine a more casual dismissal of the spirit of American constitutionalism.

 

Harris is hostile to those most American ideals of color-blindness and equality of opportunity, favoring instead the poisonous concept of “equity” that means achieving equal outcomes, as she herself has repeatedly put it. Most politicians at least would have had an internal tuning fork that would prevent them from saying this out loud. Not Kamala.

 

Of course, she’s a devotee of the 1619 Project, which trashes the history of the country she wants to lead, and a fan of its architect Nikole Hannah-Jones.

 

She has endorsed the divisive, unworkable, and unjust concept of reparations, although she’s been vague about what it would entail.

 

She brags about having ensured access to gender-reassignment surgery for California prisoners when she was the state’s attorney general, and she’s an undisguised extremist on abortion.

 

However you want to describe her role on the border in the Biden administration — czar or not — there’s no doubt that she had been opposed to enforcement and supportive of sundry benefits for illegal aliens while advocating mass amnesty.

 

If she followed through on her spending plans, which involve doubling down on Build Back Better, it’d be an enormous step toward a welfare state on a European model.

 

The initial rollout of the Harris campaign has emphasized how she was a “cop,” a tough prosecutor. This was never really true, as Rafael Mangual writes at City Journal. By 2019 and 2020, though, she was denouncing the criminal-justice system in woke terms and endorsing cuts to police spending.

 

The implicit defense of Kamala against the charge of radicalism, as she tries to shed everything she said in 2019 and 2020, is that she’s an empty-vessel opportunist who will adopt whatever positions are convenient to her at any given moment.

 

Not to worry — it was all an affectation!

 

There clearly is something to this. What’s been established, though, is that Harris doesn’t have any natural brake to her left. She may be retreating to the positions staked out by Joe Biden, who is now farther left than he has ever been before, but there’s no good reason to think that she wouldn’t snap back leftward as soon as the politics favored it again.

 

If Joe Biden couldn’t resist left-wing pressure as president, what hope is there that Kamala Harris would?

 

Even though Biden has often buckled, he still has political DNA that is naturally resistant to woke politics. He came of age in a bygone, more patriotic America; he served in a Washington where institutions mattered more; he has always had an instinct for the middle of the Democratic Party; he has a self-image of a commonsensical middle-class guy from Scranton that, even if it is manufactured or exaggerated, has had an influence on him; and he’s old.

 

None of this is true of Kamala Harris. The only significant check on her leftism is her ambition.

 

For now, that means disavowing what she was just a few years ago (and remains on many important issues). If elected, her ambition would surely switch over from trying to win some moderate swing voters to being “transformational” on progressivism’s terms.

 

In other words, she’s a clear and present danger to the American way.