OPINION:
About two weeks before President Biden dropped out of the race, my wife and I had dinner with an old friend and his wife. I’ve known him since 1981, and he has always supported every Republican presidential and state candidate. He shocked me when he said they were planning to vote for Mr. Biden because they could not stand former President Donald Trump.
About a month later, my friend and I had another dinner, this time without our wives. I pressed him about his planned vote, and he said he still thought he would vote for Vice President Harris.
This column is my last and best effort to get him to change his mind.
My friend’s principal objection to Mr. Trump is that he engaged in “nullification” regarding a Supreme Court decision. In 2020, Mr. Trump tried (unsuccessfully) to flout a Supreme Court decision reversing his cancellation of former President Barack Obama’s “Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals” program. DACA benefits illegal aliens by allowing about three-quarters of a million of them to remain in the U.S. because they arrived as minors.
Presidents don’t have the power to disobey the Supreme Court. From what we have seen from Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, Mr. Trump’s actions were trivial.
We should remember that in the case of Mr. Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, the Supreme Court specifically ruled it to be beyond his constitutional and legislated powers. He continues to “forgive” those loans despite the Court’s prohibition.
There’s an enormous difference between Mr. Trump’s action on DACA and Mr. Biden’s on student loans. The DACA decision only said that the administration had violated rulemaking procedures, enabling him to try again. It didn’t say the president lacked the authority to do what he wanted to do as it did in rejecting Mr. Biden’s student loan forgiveness.
And then there’s the Biden–Harris plan to establish term limits for the Supreme Court, force a congressionally created ethics code on it and fill the Court with liberal justices.
Moreover, a Harris-Walz administration would be hostile to the First Amendment. Mr. Walz claimed, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, especially around our democracy.”
My friend casually remarked that however Ms. Harris governed, we’d survive. I’m not so sure.
On illegal immigration, Ms. Harris is trying to pretend to be a moderate, promising more border enforcement. As border czar, she did nothing to stop or even slow the flow of illegals into our country. Illegal immigration under the Biden-Harris regime has allowed between seven and eleven million people into the country illegally. Ms. Harris can be counted on to keep the borders open.
Ms. Harris has endorsed “Bidenomics” and said there is more work to be done on it. More Bidenomics means more reckless spending, resulting in more inflation.
Ms. Harris wants price controls on food as well as national rent control, which, respectively, would reduce the food supply and be a major disincentive to building more housing.
The bloody trail of strategic weakness that Ms. Harris helped Mr. Biden pave continues through illegal immigration to the debacle she and Mr. Biden created in the Afghanistan withdrawal, to the Russian war on Ukraine and the recent indictment of six terrorists (three of whom the Israelis say are already dead) for the murder of U.S. citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Instead of that absurdly feeble response, we should – at least - have posted “dead or alive” bounties on the three believed alive.
Iran will soon have nuclear weapons. Chinese aggression in the South China Sea is accelerating. Most of our NATO allies are still not spending enough on defense to help us defend them. And, as I have written in this space, Ms. Harris’s platform promises to slash defense spending to spend more on diplomacy and “urgent” domestic priorities.
As she said in 2017, Ms. Harris is committed to making everyone “woke.” Forced on the military, Mr. Biden’s “woke” ideology is deeply and negatively affecting the readiness and lethality of our forces.
As this newspaper’s Bill Gertz reported, the U.S. military, according to a Pentagon paid-for study, is unprepared to deal with a Chinese strike with tactical nuclear weapons in a protracted war.
Part of the Biden-Harris administration’s answer to that problem is in a recent hire to the National Security Council. Sneha Nair has said she believes in eradicating “white supremacy” in the nuclear field as well as “queering nuclear weapons” as part of a diversity, equity and inclusion push she believes is essential for deterring threats to US nuclear energy facilities, according to a Fox News report.
Having performed as a radical progressive, Sen. Bernie Sanders best explained Ms. Harris’s pretense of moderation. Asked if she was abandoning her progressive principles with her more moderate campaign positions, Mr. Sanders said, “No, I don’t think she’s abandoning her ideals. I think she’s trying to be pragmatic and doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election.”
In other words, we can’t believe anything she says about moderating her positions.
So, my dear friend, please consider all these things before voting. If you cannot, in good conscience, vote for Mr. Trump, you certainly can’t vote for Ms. Harris.
• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and contributing editor for The American Spectator.
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