When politicians do live interviews, even with friendly journalists, they sometimes slip up and tell the truth. This happened on Sunday when NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) if he still considered Vice President Kamala Harris a “progressive,” even though she has recently claimed to have abandoned her support for bans on fracking and private health insurance.
“I don’t think she’s abandoning her ideals,” Sanders replied. “I think she’s trying to be pragmatic and doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election.”
That is the unvarnished truth. Harris is saying things to win votes but not dropping her left-wing agenda. In her debate with former President Donald Trump on Tuesday night and at all times since displacing President Joe Biden as the Democrats’ hope for the White House, she has striven to conceal her long-standing and unrepudiated radical left-wingery behind focus group-tested verbiage. She wants to fool voters, not persuade them, into believing she has changed. But she is really the same dangerously liberal California Democrat she has always been.
It is through this lens that one must read the “issues” page Harris launched on her website on Sunday night. An analysis of the source code shows much of it was lifted directly from Biden’s website. So much for change.
On taxes, the first topic covered, Harris promises to cut them for “working and middle-class Americans” but neglects to mention that she opposed extending the Trump tax reforms, which successfully cut taxes for everyone. She proposes renewing some expired family tax credits that were part of Biden’s failed stimulus, but these punished marriage. Harris also wants to hire thousands of new IRS agents, most of whom would audit families making less than $400,000 a year.
Harris touts a plan to “make rent more affordable and homeownership more attainable,” but the few policy details reveal this agenda item as a collection of warmed-over bad Biden policies or empty promises no Democrat has ever followed through on. Harris touts a souped-up version of Biden’s rent control plan that has been roundly criticized by economists across the political spectrum.
She also promises to “cut red tape to make sure we build more housing faster,” but she doesn’t specify which regulations she would eliminate. Her entire political career has been about increasing red tape for construction. In addition to opposing commonsense reforms to the burdensome National Environmental Policy Act, Harris supports new regulations in the form of “environmental justice” reviews that would make housing more expensive.
Where Harris doesn’t propose making housing more expensive for struggling families, she works conscientiously to drive up the cost of energy for everyone. The Biden-Harris war on fossil fuel power plants, conducted through the Environmental Protection Agency, has sent the price of electricity skyrocketing nationwide. Harris would make this worse with her preoccupation with the “climate crisis.”
If you want to know what the United States will look like after Harris is done implementing her radical climate agenda, look at her home state of California, which has the highest gas prices in the country and the highest electricity prices anywhere except Hawaii.
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Finally, buried under the subhead “Ensure Safety and Justice for All,” Harris addresses the border crisis but fails to mention it was her catch-and-release policies that created it. She supports new border security legislation that would be “the strongest reform in decades,” but nothing could be further from the truth. As we’ve covered many times, the Lankford-Mayorkas border bill would codify Biden’s catch-and-release policies, making the crisis worse.
Reporters friendly to the Democratic Party, such as ABC News’s David Muir and Linsey Davis, will never press Harris to explain why she flip-flopped on so many of her hard-left positions. It will be up to the Trump campaign to do that for voters.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
