It’s been nearly three weeks since Kamala Harris’s coronation, and she has said almost nothing that hasn’t been on a teleprompter. Her campaign website still has no policy page detailing her platform. The Democratic Party’s switcheroo at the top of the ticket has voided an important part of the vetting process, and Americans deserve to know where the party’s nominee stands on the issues. The vice president has quietly backed off of hard-left positions she held on multiple issues the last time she ran for president, including on banning fracking and private health insurance; it’s unclear if she intends to govern like the progressive candidate of 2020 who was ranked the second most liberal senator by the nonpartisan database Govtrack or as the more moderate candidate whom the Democrats are trying to market to the electorate. When Harris and Donald Trump square off in the presidential debates, moderators will have their hands full trying (assuming they want to try) to discern where the repackaged Democratic candidate stands on many issues.
To get a sense of where Harris has stood in the past, the five spirited debates in which she participated as a presidential candidate last cycle are instructive. What she said at those debates, besides her famous “that little girl was me” attack on President Biden’s previous opposition to busing, deserves scrutiny.
Voters concerned about government spending, inflation, and the national debt should be concerned by how Harris answered the first question she faced in 2019’s first debate, held on June 27. She filibustered and didn’t say “yes” when asked if Democrats have a responsibility to explain how they’d pay for “new government benefits such as student loan cancellation, free college, healthcare and more.”
Harris betrayed herself as a big spender in these debates. In the third debate, she said that the federal government should “close the teacher pay gap,” which she put at $13,500 per year, and said that she’d invest $2 trillion in historically black colleges “for teachers.” In the fourth debate, she pledged to give every American family making less than $100,000 a tax credit of up to $6,000 per year. And in her final debate before she bowed out of the race, she promised to propose legislation guaranteeing new mothers six months of paid maternity leave—twice as much as Senator Amy Klobuchar and other candidates suggested. She was asked how to pay for this and dodged the question, filibustering with platitudes about how hard women work.
In the same debate, Senator Klobuchar took a dig at Harris’s Medicare for All proposal, which would have banned private health insurance. Klobuchar said that Democrats needed to be more honest with voters about what we can afford. “And that [includes] everything from sending rich kids to college for free, which I don’t support,” Klobuchar said, “to kicking 149 million off their health insurance—current health insurance in four years,” she said.
Harris was also unable to defend her health-care plan at the second debate, when Senator Michael Bennett said that her proposal to ban employer-based health insurance would tax the middle class “to the tune of $30 trillion . . . [which is] 70 percent of what the government will collect in taxes over the next 10 years.” At the prior debate, she raised her hand when asked, “Who here would abolish their private health insurance in favor of a government-run plan?” She later claimed that she misunderstood the very straightforward question.
On the environment, Harris said at the first debate that she doesn’t use the term “climate change.” “It’s a climate crisis,” she said. “It represents an existential threat to us as a species.” At multiple debates, Harris reiterated her support for the Green New Deal, which could cost $50 trillion to $90 trillion depending on the estimate; she said at the second debate that she’d re-enter the United States in the Paris climate agreement so that we “would be carbon neutral by 2030.” McKinsey has estimated that becoming carbon neutral by 2050 would cost $275 trillion.
At the first debate, Harris and all the other candidates raised their hands to indicate support for providing free health care for illegal immigrants. Senator Bennett said at the second debate that it was a mistake to decriminalize illegal border crossings; Senator Harris disagreed. She was asked if immigrants in the country illegally should be deported if they’d committed no other offenses and, though she evaded many other questions, she was unequivocal in her answer here: “Absolutely not,” she said. Harris then said that this was a point of disagreement between her and President Obama, which caused her during her tenure as California attorney general to “issue a directive to the sheriffs of my state that they did not have to comply with [deportation] detainers.”
Harris positioned herself to the left of progressive icon Senator Elizabeth Warren on multiple issues. For example, at the fourth debate, Warren and other candidates said that their “assault style” weapons buyback plans would be voluntary, while Harris said hers would be mandatory. And on free speech, she repeatedly hectored Warren at the same debate for refusing to promise to “shut down” Trump’s Twitter account.
On crime, the California native said in the third debate that we should “de-incarcerate women and children,” and in the fourth, said we should “end mass incarceration and the failed war on drugs.” In Harris’s final debate, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard accused her of supporting “the Bush-Clinton-Trump foreign policy of regime change wars.” Rather than respond to the merit of the accusation, Harris slammed Gabbard for spending “four years full time on Fox News criticizing President Obama.” She said little of substance on foreign policy but sounded juvenile at times, as in the final debate, when she said that Trump “got punked” by Kim Jong Un, and in the fourth debate when she said of Trump, “dude got to go” because he “sold out” the Kurds in Syria.
Harris said at the second debate that she’d levy fines on companies that didn’t pay women equally: she’d assess them 1 percent of their previous year’s profit for every 1 percent differential between men and women. At multiple debates, she said that the country needed to “heal” and “unite,” but her rhetoric regarding Trump was extreme, even compared with her Trump-hating primary opponents. At the second debate, for example, she accused Trump of putting “babies in cages” and said, “we have a predator living in the White House.” At the fourth, she said that she was prepared to vote for impeachment of the “most corrupt and unpatriotic president we’ve ever had.” The impeachment proceedings wouldn’t take long, she said, “because . . . I know a confession when I see it.” When asked about the threat posed by North Korea in the final debate, she said that Trump was the “greatest threat to the national security of our nation at this moment.”
“You have to believe in what can be, unburdened by what has been,” Harris said at the third debate, a peculiar refrain that she has repeated dozens of times since. If voters are to believe in a Harris candidacy, they deserve an explanation for why she has unburdened herself of the hard-left positions she long held, and which she repeatedly voiced in her last presidential campaign.
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