Which Kamala Harris will run for president? We’ve seen two different versions of Harris. It would be premature to dismiss either, but we also should not let one obscure the risk of the other.
On the one hand, there’s the Harris we saw as California attorney general, a senator, and a presidential candidate. That Harris was a dangerous authoritarian with an unlimited appetite for power who displayed contempt for the Constitution and no regard for the rights, dignity, faith, or reputations of anyone in her way.
On the other hand, there’s the Harris we have seen as vice president: bluntly, an idiot. That Harris is a figure of fun and hardly seems in danger of accomplishing anything. She’s been endlessly compared to the Julia Louis-Dreyfus character on Veep, with her speeches full of empty cliches and time-filling blather. She has hemorrhaged staff. The Biden White House never assigns her anything but hopelessly lost causes and impossible tasks while endlessly leaking about the low regard in which she is held.
These two pictures are not necessarily inconsistent. Power hunger is not limited to the smart, the competent, or the eloquent. Incompetence is not limited to the meek. Disregard for America’s Constitution, laws, and basic civics can proceed as much from ignorance as from malice. Harris, raised in the progressive hothouse of the San Francisco Bay Area, is reflexive rather than considered because she has never really had to engage with opposing ideas, win the support of people who disagree with her, or pay a political price for disregarding their rights.
The Threat to the Courts
My most specific fear of Harris from the early days of her presidential bid has been her support for adding to the number of justices to pack the Supreme Court. I have previously discussed at length why Court-packing for the purely ideological/partisan purposes of changing the Court’s decisions is the single gravest threat to our constitutional system among anything done or proposed in American politics over the past decade. It is a crossing of the Rubicon that would, in a single stroke, destroy the Supreme Court as a guardian of the rule of written law, reducing it to a banana-republic appendage of whoever happened to be in power at any particular time.
The instinct of Harris and other progressives in this direction has thus far been restrained by three factors. One is the Democrats’ tenuous majority in the Senate, which includes two institutionalists unwilling to break the filibuster to impose radical systemic change. Both (Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) are retiring, and Sinema may be replaced by an arch-progressive. The second is Republican control of the House, which presently hangs by a thread. The third is the last remnants of Biden’s own sense of institutionalism, which has crumbled time and again when pressed by his party’s radicals.
In 2020, after Biden criticized Court-packing during the primaries, he and Harris both refused to commit themselves on the issue in the fall. They got away with this, although the issue played badly for Democrats in multiple Senate races. That’s why the progressives have worked so hard in the interim on creating a smoke screen of “ethics” complaints in order to lay the groundwork for claiming that they are saving rather than trashing the judiciary. The end goal, however, is the same.
Just last weekend, Biden caved further and told the Congressional Progressive Caucus that he was about to roll out a plan aimed at “limiting the Court” that appears to entail removing some of its current members in order to change its decisions. It remains to be seen whether Harris pushes the same plan, or even a more radical one — and, in either event, what the details are. But her past advocacy for this step is, by itself, absolutely disqualifying in an American presidential candidate. It marks her as an enemy of the rule of law and of our Constitution.
The Heavy Hand
Court-packing is hardly the only way in which Harris is not only terrible on just about every public-policy issue under the sun but also dangerously authoritarian and contemptuous of the essential norms that have allowed our system of constitutional democracy to survive this long. There is no question that Harris is inclined to use every lever of power available to circumvent Congress and bring the machinery of government down on anyone who stands in the way of her agenda. A sample:
Harris pledged to issue a gun ban by presidential executive fiat; when Biden objected that the Constitution might be an obstacle to that, she laughed out loud at the idea of the Constitution as an obstacle.
In 2017, Harris opposed Justice Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation on the grounds that he was too concerned with the law to serve on the Supreme Court, saying that he “valued legalisms over real lives.”
As California attorney general, Harris used her office’s criminal-enforcement powers to go after David Daleiden for exposing Planned Parenthood’s involvement in illegal fetal-tissue trafficking, including raiding his apartment. Then, working hand in glove with Planned Parenthood, she lobbied for the legislature to empower her successor to prosecute Daleiden for undercover journalism. Many of Harris’s charges against Daleiden were later thrown out in court. This is a blatant assault on free speech and a free press. Long after Harris left California, Daleiden is still fighting the legal assault against him.
Harris also weaponized her office as California attorney general to pursue Americans for Prosperity and other groups over their dissent from left-wing climate orthodoxy. Harris’s effort to force nonprofits to disclose their donor lists was later found to violate the First Amendment, but not before a court found that Harris’s office “systematically failed to maintain the confidentiality” of those records. Of course, intimidating the donors out of giving was the point. Her position was so extreme, and so favorable to foreign tyrants such as Xi Jinping, that it was denounced by a massive cross-ideological spectrum of amicus groups including the Biden administration itself and resulted in a Supreme Court rebuke that specifically cited the misconduct of Harris’s office. Liberals were appalled at how badly the case went.
Harris ran on rewriting immigration law by presidential executive fiat, a platform David French aptly characterized at the time as “Why run for president when you can run for queen?” Of course, the Biden m.o. of trying to rule by executive order would only accelerate with Harris as president.
Harris pledged another executive fiat on prescription drugs: “I’ll give Congress 100 days to send legislation to my desk to stop Big Pharma from raking in massive profits at the expense of Americans. If Congress won’t act, I will.”
Harris pledged to bulldoze the legislative filibuster, interring two centuries of Senate tradition, if Congress does not pass the Green New Deal.
Harris demanded, with no basis whatsoever in the Constitution, that states be required to “pre-clear” changes to their abortion laws through the federal executive branch.
In California, Harris pushed to jail parents for truancy, using a law whose passage she advocated.
Harris has publicly embraced on multiple occasions “my dear friend” Al Sharpton, the most toxic figure in American political life, responsible for inciting murder, riot, arson, and antisemitic pogroms, leading a hoax rape accusation against innocent men, and tax evasion, among other things.
By contrast, as a senator, Harris grilled a judicial nominee on his membership in the long-standing, mainstream Catholic group the Knights of Columbus.
During the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Harris ran with the most scurrilous smears against him, reading into the Congressional Record the ludicrous and since-discredited gang-rape charge peddled by Michael Avenatti. Harris tried to get Kavanaugh impeached from the D.C. Circuit. Truth was beside the point; Kavanaugh was in the way.
Remember when people professed to be shocked by “lock her up” because Americans aren’t supposed to advocate jailing their political opponents? Harris said during her campaign that she would have “no choice” but to criminally prosecute Trump if elected.
Harris frequently defended her hard-line stances as attorney general by claiming that she was bound to defend the law, but she refused to defend the popularly enacted Proposition 8 (barring same-sex marriage) in court.
Similarly, when political violence erupts on her own side, Harris plays a different tune. During the George Floyd riots, she supported a fund to bail out rioters, making it more difficult for order to be restored and exacerbating the violence, the thwarting of government business, and destruction of property of innocent people.
Finally, there is Harris’s record as a criminal prosecutor. While I have no objection to the aggressive use of proper law-enforcement powers against crime, there is an enormous paper trail of criticism of Harris for, among other things, defending unjust convictions, withholding evidence, protecting prosecutorial misconduct, and even arguing that prisoners should not be released because the state needed their labor.
The overall picture of Harris’s record is one that ought to alarm anyone who believes in limited constitutional government and individual liberty. As David Harsanyi concluded: “There is no power Harris has held that she hasn’t abused.” The fact that much of this passes for mainstream thought in her party makes this worse, not better. Our system has a strong immune system against threats of the sort that Donald Trump has presented; it has a very weak immune system against threats of the sort Harris presents. Virtually every abuse of power she champions would have a battery of institutions — the press, the academy, the bar — lining up to support her.
This is before we even address ways in which Harris is dangerous in more irresponsible ways. For example, during the 2020 vice-presidential debate, Harris baselessly raised alarms about the safety of Covid vaccines solely on the grounds that they had been developed under the Trump administration: “If Donald Trump tells us to take it, I’m not taking it.” She’s also been a supporter of race-based reparations, a deeply illiberal idea.
Veep Veep
Harris has spent most of the past four years as vice president serving up word salads and doing other dead-end ceremonial jobs, so she has had far fewer opportunities to add to her rap sheet of dangerous statements and positions. But the signs are still there. In 2022, she claimed that America does not have “free and fair elections” and hired a communications director who had recently claimed that the 2000 election was stolen. At one point, she floated using executive orders to unilaterally take over state elections.
On political prosecutions, Harris has remained consistent in office as vice president. She constantly touts the abusive criminal charges against Donald Trump; as to Alvin Bragg’s case premised upon the theory that Trump stole the 2016 election, Harris crowed of the verdict, “cheaters don’t like getting caught and being held accountable.” Meanwhile, she blasted special counsel Robert Hur (inaccurately, as we all now know) for his description of Biden’s memory issues: “The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly politically motivated.”
Harris has also signaled her support for pro-Hamas protesters “who have mobilized against the destruction of Gaza. . . . They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza.” As Noah Rothman details, Harris is seen by the radicals as an ally.
