The so-called “reintroduction” of Vice President Kamala Harris notwithstanding, Americans should be frightened by the prospect of a Harris presidency.
From coast to coast, rather than a career of praiseworthy accomplishments for the United States, Harris’s extreme liberalism has instead produced a long trail of human suffering in her wake. In California , where her reckless policies and poor judgment left people living in fear of violence and decay; at the southern border , where her ineptitude caused and exacerbated an unprecedented security crisis; and even overseas, where victims of tyranny and terrorism suffer as the White House projects only weakness.
Her record strongly suggests that if given the responsibility to protect the American people as president, Harris will cause even more harm.
Just three months into her position as San Francisco’s district attorney in 2004, Harris refused to support maximum punishment for a local gang member after he killed a police officer using an assault rifle, a move that did not sit well with officer Isaac Espinoza’s heartbroken family or Californians at the time. Even Harris’s fellow Democrats were shocked at her decision.
Outside Espinoza’s funeral, the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) adamantly urged Harris to change her position and insisted the shooting was “not only the definition of tragedy, [but] the special circumstance called for by the death penalty law.”
Feinstein even remarked that had she known Harris was so opposed to holding criminals accountable, she probably would not have endorsed her for the district attorney position.
The Espinoza tragedy did not appear to teach Harris a lesson on leadership or impress upon her a deeper appreciation for the cost of human lives. In her next role as California’s attorney general, Harris supported a heartless truancy law, passed in 2011, that criminalized parents whose children repeatedly missed class, which was later found to affect people of color disproportionately .
Under the law, a parent or guardian could face up to a year of prison or fines totaling at least $2,500 if his or her child missed more than 20 days of school. In one case, Cheree Peoples , a single mother of a daughter with special needs, was put in jail for her daughter’s absences. The girl’s genetic condition, sickle cell anemia, caused her debilitating pain, but Peoples was nonetheless punished for keeping her sick child home. Harris is indeed a fitting face of the so-called “ party of compassion ” that, in practice, is anything but.
Flash forward to Harris’s failed 2020 presidential bid, and one can clearly see that insensitivity to the plight of a frightened U.S. had become her modus operandi. That summer, instead of backing the brave police officers who worked overtime to protect their neighborhoods amid havoc and skyrocketing crime, Harris promoted a bail fund to get leftist rioters out of jail.
To add insult to injury, most of the $41 million contributed to the fund wasn’t even spent on those involved in the protests and riots. It was spent on releasing knife murderers, rapists, and kidnappers, putting countless people in harm’s way, and endangering local businesses , many of which were immigrant- or minority-owned.
At a time of historic national tension, Harris could have used her elevated platform to support the people victimized by the rioters’ chaos and carnage. She could have called on people to help rebuild their neighbors’ burned-down shops and restaurants, most of which were located in underserved communities. But she didn’t.
Ricardo Hernandez, the owner of an ice cream shop in Minneapolis, lamented that his 20 Latino employees were out of work because of the violence surrounding his store.
“We used up all our money to build something nice for … not just the Latino community, but everybody,” he told the Star Tribune. “It’s very hard to see your whole life savings go down like this.”
Down the block, an immigrant from Ecuador named Luis Tamay saw his restaurant burned to the ground. According to the outlet, “He guarded his lifelong dream the first few nights of the riots, but stayed home on Friday night to abide by the curfew, assuming that he had nothing to fear with the National Guard in town.”
As he climbed the rubble, Tamay's words were solemn: “Seventeen years of work is gone.”
Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) allowed the rampage to persist. Harris aided the perpetrators who were caught. In other words, both Harris and her running mate chose to turn their backs on truly vulnerable people to satisfy the moment’s ideological fads.
These fiascos reveal the Harris we know today, whose shameful dereliction of duty as President Joe Biden’s " border czar " makes her one of the nation’s most inept figureheads next to Biden himself. Harris has visited the U.S.-Mexico border just once since taking office and stood idly by as an estimated 10 million illegal immigrants brought deadly drugs, criminal networks, and people on the terrorist watchlist into the country. Her failure has caused immense suffering on both sides of the border, encourages migrants to make a treacherous and often deadly journey, and facilitates the human trafficking of children.
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Harris’s recklessness hasn’t stopped at the water’s edge. From Afghanistan to Ukraine to a Middle East that is in flames, the Biden-Harris administration’s foreign policy has resulted in conflict and disorder. Her recent statements on Israel after meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were highly critical at a time when the Jewish state arguably faces the most severe threat in its history. Just days after her shocking comments, Hezbollah killed 12 Israeli children in a rocket attack. We have little information on how Harris might approach growing threats from China and North Korea, but her record suggests no reason to be optimistic.
It is impossible to undo the suffering, loss, and misery caused by Harris’s failures thus far, and it could take decades to reverse the devastating effects of a Harris presidency. We should remember her record and reject Biden’s left-wing co-pilot from steering our country into dangerous territory.
Timothy Head is the executive director of the Faith & Freedom Coalition.
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