Editors of the Washington Examiner highlight one authoritarian element of a potential Kamala Harris administration.
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 point 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.