W hich 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:
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.
Kamala Harris is a menace to the American system. Her advancement to the presidency would be a terrifying prospect for liberty and law.