Where Does Kamala Stand?

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s debate, it’s appropriate to try to figure out where the candidates stand on some of the important issues. With Trump, that’s not very hard: he has a limited number of themes that are mostly quite specific, and he repeats them endlessly. But with Harris, it’s remarkably difficult. Many of her positions today seem to be different from, if not the opposite of, where she stood when last she articulated a list of positions, which was during her brief campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2019. In the current campaign, she rarely addresses a significant issue directly. During the debate, when asked to address some issues, she resorted to carefully scripted talking points that could be subject to multiple interpretations.

But then we have the actual record of the Biden/Harris administration to use to interpret any intentionally ambiguous statements. Actions speak much louder than words.

So let’s consider some of her statements during the debate, in the context of the actions of the administration of which she is a part, or of her own prior actions. For these purposes, I have found a transcript of the debate to get her exact words.

Energy Policy

In my post of September 3, I took note of Harris’s apparent recent flip-flop on the issue of “fracking.” That post had a quote from Harris from 2019 that was completely definitive on the issue: "“[T]here’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” But in her one press interview since being nominated, the CNN interview of August 29, she had said “we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”

But “fracking” is only a piece of energy policy, and “banning” fracking is only one of many possible approaches. Short of banning fracking, there could be restricting it, obstructing it, hindering it in every way possible, and banishing it from federal lands. And then there are all the other pieces of energy policy, like drilling generally (on federal lands and offshore), pipelines, power plants, electric versus combustion vehicles, subsidies for alternative energy, and so on and on and on. In light of all these things, in the September 3 post I called the fracking issue a “distraction.”

Naturally, the moderators of the debate addressed only what I had called the “distraction.” Here is the exchange:

LINSEY DAVIS: Vice President Harris, in your last run for president you said you wanted to ban fracking. . . . I know you say that your values have not changed. So then why have so many of your policy positions changed?

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: So my values have not changed. . . . Let's talk about fracking because we're here in Pennsylvania. I made that very clear in 2020. I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as Vice President of the United States. And, in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking. My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil. We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over rely on foreign oil.

The key line is “I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as Vice President.” Well, neither the Vice President nor the President has the power to ban fracking, at least on private lands and without a specific statute from the Congress. But that is a small part of the issue of energy policy, and completely misses the main point, which is that the Biden/Harris administration has done everything in its power to hinder, obstruct, and delay the development of hydrocarbon fuel resources and related infrastructure, whether that be oil and gas wells, pipelines, power plants, combustion vehicles, or anything else. In the September 3 post I had a list of some of the major administration initiatives, including regulations to force the closure of coal and natural gas power plants, restricting drilling (particularly fracking) on federal lands, canceling pipelines, harassing refineries, outlawing combustion vehicles, and more. Here from Thomas Pyle at the Institute for Energy Research is a compilation of no fewer than 250 different “ways the Biden-Harris Administration, and their allies, have made it harder to produce oil & gas.” In light of this blizzard of initiatives, the question of “banning fracking” fades to insignificance. These are the initiatives of the Biden/Harris administration, and clearly Harris supports them.

There is no question that Harris is a zero-carbon green radical. Nothing about her carefully scripted statement in the debate about fracking changes that.

The Border

Similarly as with the fracking issue, Harris made statements at the debate about the border situation that cannot be reconciled with the record of the administration. Here is the exchange at the debate:

DAVID MUIR: We're going to turn now to immigration and border security. . . . Vice President Harris, you were tasked by President Biden with getting to the root causes of migration from Central America. We know that illegal border crossings reached a record high in the Biden administration. This past June, President Biden imposed tough new asylum restrictions. We know the numbers since then have dropped significantly. But my question to you tonight is why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act and would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this?

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: . . . [L]et me say that the United States Congress, including some of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came up with a border security bill which I supported. And that bill would have put 1,500 more border agents on the border to help those folks who are working there right now over time trying to do their job. It would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States. . . .

Again, I would call the bill in question — an early 2024 effort that failed in the Senate — a distraction. When Trump was in office, he had the border largely closed, and when Biden and Harris came in, they threw it open. Nothing about the statutes had changed, and therefore it is clear that no new statute was required to re-instate the Trump policies that had previously mostly closed the border. The Biden/Harris change of policy was a completely intentional effort to bring in as many illegal immigrants as possible. There is no reason to think that if suddenly 1500 additional border agents were available that the Biden/Harris administration would have used them to restrict entry at the border in some fashion. Harris’s debate statement therefore is completely contrary to the administration’s own policies.

Decriminalizing border crossings; mandatory gun buy-backs

Here are two question posed by moderator Linsey Davis that Vice President Harris completely failed to answer:

LINSEY DAVIS: Vice President Harris, in your last run for president you said . . . [y]ou wanted mandatory government buyback programs for assault weapons. Now your campaign says you don't. You supported decriminalizing border crossings. Now you're taking a harder line. I know you say that your values have not changed. So then why have so many of your policy positions changed?

This is the same question from Davis where the subject of fracking was broached. In her answer, Harris addressed fracking, but not these other two subjects.

On the issue of decriminalizing border crossings, has there been a single criminal prosecution for crossing the border illegally? Not that I’ve heard of. The administration’s policy could not be clearer.

“Mandatory buyback programs” for guns is another distraction from the moderators. Much more relevant is that, as District Attorney of San Francisco in 2008, Harris signed an amicus brief in the Heller case in the Supreme Court in which she advocated that there is no individual right under the Second Amendment to keep and bear arms.

In short, if you watched the debate or reviewed it afterward, you could easily have gotten impressions of Harris’s positions on critical policy issues that are exactly the opposite of where she really stands, as revealed by her own actions and those of the Biden/Harris administration.