Editors at National Review Online highlight one way in which Vice President Kamala Harris seeks to be unburdened by what has been.
Vice President Kamala Harris managed to become the presumptive Democratic nominee in record time after President Biden was forced to drop out of the race, and now, with breathless speed, she is dramatically reversing positions that she once claimed were strongly held when she last ran for president. Whether these new positions last longer than the old ones is something voters won’t know until after the election.
When Harris entered the Senate in 2017, it was the heyday of anti-Trump resistance on the left. With the aging socialist Senator Bernie Sanders having given eventual loser Hillary Clinton a run for her money in the prior year’s primaries, there was a growing belief that the next Democratic nominee would have to appeal to his movement. As a freshman senator with presidential aspirations and with a prosecutor image that alienated some on the left, Harris wasn’t going to miss a beat. In a short period of time, she racked up a voting record that ranked her as the most progressive U.S. senator.
Harris was one of 16 co-sponsors of Sanders’s socialized health-care plan branded as “Medicare for All,” which would have cost $34 trillion over a decade, according to the left-wing Urban Institute. It would also have necessitated kicking about 180 million people off their private insurance plans. She also signed on to the Senate version of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s radical Green New Deal.
In 2019, as the Democratic primaries took off, there was fierce competition to the left of Joe Biden. Harris dug into her support for banning private insurance before (unconvincingly) trying to take it back. She called for banning fracking and offshore drilling. She said those who crossed the border illegally shouldn’t be treated as criminals and called for getting rid of ICE and starting from scratch.
