Harris Had a More Leftist Voting Record Than Sanders

Written by Robert Knight

Within hours of her being announced as President Biden’s presumed replacement as the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris’ moderate makeover began.

Journalists reflexively began gushing over her “historic” candidacy and centrist views.

The love bombing and sheer dishonesty is a replay of 2020, when she ran for vice president as a supposed moderate.

The facts loudly spoke otherwise. As a U.S. senator from California from 2017 to 2021, she had a more leftist voting record even than socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, Vermont independent.

She co-sponsored his Medicare for All bill, which would have eliminated private health insurance and forced Americans into a government plan.

She co-sponsored the Equality Act, a sweeping bill that would add gender identity and sexual orientation to the federal civil rights code. The proposed law would prevent states from enacting statutes barring males from female locker rooms and athletic teams.

The Equality Act would also block states from passing laws protecting minors from being subjected to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical removal of healthy body parts by quack doctors.

Still being pushed by Democrats, the bill would effectively criminalize Christianity, observant Judaism and other religion-based sexual morality and turn common sense into an actionable offense. It would create what amounts to a state-enforced secular religion of sexual anarchy.

In 2019, Ms. Harris sponsored the bizarrely named Do No Harm Act, which would have forced Catholic hospitals and other faith-based health institutions to perform abortions and gender transition surgeries.

In 2018, Ms. Harris sharply questioned Trump judicial nominee Brian Buescher about being a member of the Knights of Columbus because the 2 million-member Catholic men’s group opposes abortion and defends traditional marriage.

She also co-sponsored in 2019 the U.S. Senate version of U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s $10 trillion Green New Deal and said in a CNN town hall that she wanted to abolish the filibuster in order to get it passed.

As vice president, she cast the tie-breaking U.S. Senate vote in August 2022 to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, the $1.2 trillion porkapalooza that puts hundreds of billions into green pockets — the biggest piece of grift ever acquired by the climate change industry.

This past week, while Israel faces war on virtually all its borders, antisemitic protesters burned U.S. flags, trashed Union Station’s statue and invaded the hotel where the Israeli delegation was staying. Ms. Harris skipped the address to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Instead, she spoke to a sorority group.

As California attorney general, she backed a state law that forced pro-life pregnancy centers into offering abortion referrals and even advertising abortion clinics. That clear violation of religious liberty and the First Amendment’s protection against forced speech was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra in 2018.

She also declined to seek the death penalty for a convicted cop killer and pushed diversity, equity and inclusion training on California law enforcement agencies.

But Democrats need not worry about any of this. Like Mr. Biden, who was touted as a good old centrist before becoming the most leftist president in history, Ms. Harris gets plenty of cover.

Here’s a sample from 2020, when she was running for vice president.

“Kamala Harris comes from the middle-of-the-road, moderate wing of the Democratic Party,” ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos said. The New York Times called her a “pragmatic moderate,” and the Los Angeles Times labeled her a “centrist,” as did The Associated Press.

And the media wonder why so many Americans have no trust in them.

This past week, they were at it again. The media ran dozens of articles and “news” segments glossing over the vice president’s radical past while playing up her “tough on crime” credentials as a former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general.

Did you expect at least a mention about her sponsoring a fund to bail out Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters in 2020? You are such a child.

Likewise, the media are airbrushing Ms. Harris’ record as “border czar” in charge of immigration since 2022. An estimated 6 million aliens have crossed into the United States illegally on her watch, as well as enough fentanyl to kill billions of people. But her title isn’t “official,” the media explain, even though they all used it — until now.

Since 2024 dawned, the border numbers are down, with media comparing current intake with a select period during the Trump years. It’s a classic example of Mark Twain’s observation about misleading statistics being worse than “damned lies.”

And speaking of misleading memes, the Post ran an editorial cartoon on Thursday by Ann Telnaes titled “America’s Choice.”

Two women are walking together, and one says, “So, now the choice is between an old, convicted felon who packed the U.S. Supreme Court and overturned Roe v. Wade and a former prosecutor who supports a woman’s right to choose.”

Is it possible that Ms. Telnaes doesn’t know that “court packing” means adding more than nine justices, something Mr. Trump does not advocate? It’s a Democratic scheme hatched by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration and resurrected to intimidate Chief Justice John Roberts’ court.

Democrats are also pushing “reforms” aimed at getting rid of Clarence Thomas and other conservatives.

If Ms. Telnaes does indeed know what “court packing” means, she is being mendacious and willfully spreading ignorance.

What are the odds of that — or a dishonest vetting of Kamala Harris — happening in the mainstream media?

This article was originally published by The Washington Times.

Robert Knight is a former Los Angeles Times news editor and writer and was a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This column was originally published by The Washington Times.

He has been published by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Christian Post, AmericanThinker.com, DailyCaller.com, Townhall.com, OneNewsNow.com and many others.  He has co-authored three books and written 10, including “Liberty on the Brink: How the Left Plans to Steal Your Vote” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) and “The Coming Communist Wave: What Happens If the Left Captures All Three Branches of Government” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) . 

You can follow him on Twitter at @RobertKnight17, and his website is roberthknight.com.