OPINION:
Narratives shift quickly in Washington. As soon as Democratic Party elites decided in a back room somewhere that Vice President Kamala Harris would stand in place of President Biden on the 2024 Democratic ticket, orders were dispatched to redefine her record.
Within hours, it became forbidden to refer to Ms. Harris as the “border czar,” as if that did not precisely describe the mission she had been tasked to complete. Ms. Harris said as much in her cover letter introducing the administration’s border strategy, writing that “the President asked me to lead our nation’s efforts to address the root causes of that [illegal] migration.”
In response to conservatives pointing out that the presumptive Democratic nominee has failed in this mission, Axios went full Pravda, asserting that its prior reporting was incorrect. “This article has been updated and clarified to note that Axios was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar’ in 2021.”
It’s true that no administration official has business cards with “czar” as the job title. In 1982, the Treasury Department official charged with stemming the flow of illicit substances in the country was informally called the “drug czar.” The label stuck because it is a compact expression accurately describing an official’s area of responsibility.
Axios isn’t alone in trying to unburden itself of what has been. The Media Research Center compiled a comprehensive set of television news clips from the major networks calling Ms. Harris the border czar before turning around and claiming that Republicans were the ones calling her the border czar — as if calling attention to her lack of achievement on a critical policy issue were somehow out of bounds.
The administration’s failure to control the border allowed around 10 million uninvited guests to enter the country illegally, leading 77% of the public to call the border situation a “major problem,” according to a Gallup Poll from June.
In another bit of revision, the GovTrack website quietly erased its 2019 description of the voting record of Ms. Harris as the “most liberal compared to All Senators.” The statement had been based on an analysis of the bills and resolutions that she sponsored. GovTrack claims it is “committed to integrity” and would “never misrepresent or exclude information to favor one side of an issue before Congress,” but the erasure coincided with Mr. Biden’s deletion from the campaign.
The bills Ms. Harris introduced in 2019 and 2020 speak for themselves. The DONE Act would have unsecured the border even further by prohibiting the expansion of immigrant detention centers, and S. 2219 would have given illegal aliens the right to free lawyers so that they could dispute and litigate their unlawful entry into the country.
It’s obvious Ms. Harris is as much a fan of chaos at the border as she is of chaos on the streets. She raised money for Black Lives Matter rioters in the summer of 2020 that left 19 dead and at least $2 billion in property damage.
The left wants the public to forget that, as stores were being looted and buildings set on fire, Ms. Harris tweeted, “If you’re able to, chip in now to the MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”
The actions and words of Ms. Harris over the past several years define who she really is. Don’t be fooled by the carefully synchronized effort to hide her record.
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