Vice President Kamala Harris is in a statistical dead heat with former President Donald Trump in the state of Michigan, which explains why she was in Flint last Saturday campaigning for votes. The same polling shows Harris losing to Trump by 20 points among men, which explains why she took the time to tell the audience, “Michigan, let us be clear: Contrary to what my opponent is suggesting, I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive.”
Unfortunately, telling people in the United States what kind of car they must drive is precisely what Harris has proposed to codify in law in the past. It is also what President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency has enacted through regulation, and it is what Harris will continue to pursue if she is elected to the White House.
When Harris was a junior senator from California, she joined with Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to introduce the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act of 2019. This bill would have amended the Clean Air Act to direct the EPA to dictate that half the new cars sold in 2030 would be “zero-emission vehicles,” i.e., electric cars. The legislation ramped up the required percentage of electric cars sold by 5% every year so that all cars sold by 2040 would be electric.
Therefore, as a senator, Harris absolutely supported telling you what car you would be allowed to drive in 2040. She wanted to force people to buy electric cars or nothing else.
Despite failing to amend the Clean Air Act to give the EPA authority to ban gas-powered cars, the Biden administration proposed a regulation even more stringent than Harris’s.
Biden’s Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards rule sought to control what cars people were allowed to drive by mandating that a certain percentage of all new cars sold must be electric. However, Biden raised the initial mandate to 60% by 2030 and 67% by 2032. Facing fierce resistance from auto worker unions, he lowered the initial 2030 mandate to 50% but kept the 2032 mandate at 67%. Harris fervently endorsed these policies.
When reporters asked if she still supported her 2019 legislation banning the sale of new gas-powered cars, the Harris campaign declined to comment. However, she has never criticized Biden’s similar mandate or renounced her support for it.
It is understandable why Harris is falsely claiming she doesn’t want to control what cars we drive. The Pew Research Center found that 59% of adults oppose the phasing out of gas-powered cars by 2035, largely because they don’t believe the infrastructure will be there to support electric cars. The same Pew poll found that 53% of adults don’t believe the U.S. will build enough charging stations to make electric vehicle ownership practical.
Harris and the Democratic Party have tried to change this perception but have failed. Biden’s and Harris’s infrastructure spending earmarked $7.5 billion for installing electric vehicle charging stations nationwide, but after three years, it managed to build only seven.
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Harris is trying to pull a fast one. She wants voters to believe she has dropped the far-left positions she took a few years ago on matters ranging from fracking to gun confiscation, open borders, and banning private health insurance. She is pretending to have had a big change of perspective on all these matters, but we are left to judge that only by unexplained assertions rather than even scantly detailed explanations. At the same time, she continues to say her values haven’t changed.
Harris is telling the truth when she says her values haven’t changed. Her real positions remain unaltered. Given the opportunity, she would confiscate guns, ban private health insurance, and tell people what cars they can drive.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
