A far-left record on policy and legislation follows Vice President Kamala Harris into the presidential race, complicating her bid to win over critical swing-state voters who do not align with ultraliberal candidates.
Ms. Harris, 59, debuted her presidential campaign this week with an agenda and message aimed at the moderate middle, but her record in the Senate, where she was once ranked the most liberal, and past statements supported a much different agenda.
Taxes
In her 2020 presidential bid, Ms. Harris campaigned on ending the Trump-era individual tax cuts, which slashed taxes for Americans at nearly all income levels. The cuts expire in January.
Ms. Harris also backed a corporate tax increase from the current 21% to 35%.
She joined President Biden to promote a 2025 budget that taxes wealthy individuals on unrealized capital gains.
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Ms. Harris separately proposed a financial transaction tax on stocks, bonds and derivatives.
Ms. Harris has not proposed a tax plan as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, but the Biden-Harris ticket pledged to avoid raising taxes on anyone with an annual income of less than $400,000. If the Trump-era tax cuts expire, however, those at nearly every income level will be hit with a tax increase.
The Tax Foundation says the 2025 Biden-Harris budget would cut the nation’s economic output by 1.6% and eliminate 666,000 full-time jobs. “If Harris took the tax increases further, as she has supported in the past, the economic losses would be even larger,” the foundation said.
Crime
Ms. Harris this week promoted her record as a former California attorney general. She told supporters in Milwaukee she was tough on crime and “took on perpetrators of all kinds.”
Her critics, among them Reform California’s Carl DeMaio, said she was “one of the biggest coddlers of the criminals we have had” in California. He called her “the original Soros prosecutor,” linking her to the ultra-wealthy leftist donor George Soros.
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Ms. Harris, who served as San Francisco district attorney from 2004 to 2011, backed Proposition 47, which raised the threshold for penalties for property and drug crimes, allowing people to steal up to $950 per day without facing prosecution.
She helped author Proposition 57, which allows for the early release of some imprisoned criminals. Critics of the measure say it permits early release for those convicted of rape by intoxication of an unconscious person and human trafficking involving a sex act with minors.
In 2020, Ms. Harris joined fellow liberal Democrats in backing plans to divert public funding away from policing.
“We have confused the idea that to achieve safety, you put more cops on the streets, instead of understanding to achieve health and safe communities, you put more resources into the public education system in those communities, into affordable housing and homeownership. … That’s how you achieve safe and healthy communities,” Ms. Harris said during an appearance on ABC’s “The View.” “We really do need to reimagine how we make communities safe.”
Health care
Ms. Harris hasn’t offered health care proposals as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, but she supports universal health care.
In 2017, she co-sponsored Sen. Bernard Sanders’ “Medicare for All” legislation, which would have banned private health insurance and created a government-run system open to everyone, including illegal immigrants.
At the time, Ms. Harris called the legislation “the morally and ethically right thing to do.” She said, “It just makes sense from a fiscal standpoint.”
When she ran for president in 2019, Ms. Harris modified her proposal to expand Medicare to allow private insurance to offer a plan in the system. At the end of 10 years, everyone would be enrolled in Medicare, either through a new Medicare plan or one offered by the private insurance system.
To pay for the proposal, Ms. Harris proposed taxing Wall Street transactions and imposing a 4% tax on households earning more than $100,000 annually, with specific exemptions for households in high-cost areas.
Energy
The Biden-Harris administration implemented a net zero policy across the government. The policies aim to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in cars and trucks, buildings and homes, and power plants in the next two to three decades and power them with renewable sources such as wind and solar.
In 2019, Ms. Harris, then a senator, co-sponsored the Green New Deal, which called for ending the use of fossil fuels within a decade.
She has co-sponsored legislation banning offshore drilling. As a presidential candidate in 2019, she told a CNN town hall audience, “There is no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” a method of extracting natural gas from the ground.
During her 2020 presidential campaign, Ms. Harris pledged to spend $10 trillion to transition the U.S. to zero-emission energy by 2045.
Israel
Ms. Harris was absent this week when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a joint address to Congress, an event the vice president typically attends. She later condemned protesters near the Capitol who defaced monuments and burned flags in the name of the terrorist organization Hamas.
“I support the right to peacefully protest, but let’s be clear: Antisemitism, hate and violence of any kind has no place in our nation.”
Illegal immigration
Ms. Harris has not yet announced her agenda for securing the southern border, a top voter concern. She has been roundly criticized for doing little to stop illegal immigration after President Biden appointed her to head up the effort.
Ms. Harris visited the southern border once. She stopped near El Paso, Texas, in June 2021.
As late as 2019, she denied that crossing the border illegally is a crime. “Being an undocumented immigrant is not a crime,” Ms. Harris said on “Pod Save America.”
The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this report.
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.
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