Shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race on Sunday, he endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, in what is now an open Democratic primary.
In addition to Biden’s endorsement, Harris enjoys many advantages, such as the fact that her candidacy will face fewer fundraising and ballot-qualifying challenges than other potential candidates in her party at this late date in the election cycle.
Yet, she also faces potential liabilities, too. Republicans often mock her for using awkward turns of phrase such as “what can be, unburdened by what has been,” and for her high-pitched laugh, which many compare to that of a hyena.
Her record on policy may also prove a liability.
Here are five things to know about that record.
Harris has cultivated a bubbly exterior as vice president, but before she followed Biden into the White House, she developed a record for being tough on crime and weaponizing the law to silence her political opponents.
As district attorney of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011, she led her office in obtaining more than 1,900 convictions for marijuana offenses, though her office had a policy against pursuing jail time for marijuana possession offenses. Biden and then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, attacked Harris on that issue during the 2020 presidential primaries.
Harris served as California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017, when she entered the U.S. Senate. As state attorney general, she used the law to target her political and ideological opponents.
David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress released a slew of undercover sting videos showing Planned Parenthood staff admitting to selling aborted babies’ body parts for profit in 2014. Harris, who received funding from Planned Parenthood during her 2016 Senate campaign, directed her office to search Daleiden’s home, seizing his video footage and preparing a legal case against him. Her successor as California attorney general, Xavier Becerra (now secretary of health and human services), filed 15 felony charges against Daleiden and his center in 2017.
“I would say this is an abuse of the criminal process,” Peter Breen, special counsel at the Thomas More Society, told PJ Media in 2020. “I could point you to undercover investigations that are being shown on the evening news in Los Angeles. Under the standard they are applying to David, those would be felonies.”
Planned Parenthood and others sued for damages, accusing Daleiden of conspiracy, eavesdropping, and other claims. A judge awarded $2.4 million in damages and more than $13 million in attorneys’ fees. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Daleiden’s appeal, allowing most of the damages to stand.
In May 2020, Daleiden sued Becerra and Harris, claiming Harris conspired with Planned Parenthood to violate his civil rights by prosecuting him for the undercover investigation. That case remains pending.
Harris also targeted the conservative groups Americans for Prosperity and American Freedom Law Center. Her office demanded that those groups turn over their IRS Schedule B tax forms, which include donor information. Both groups refused to hand over the forms, citing concerns for donor anonymity.
Meanwhile, activists on the Left had created a video game involving a shooter massacring staff at Americans for Prosperity headquarters.
Victor Bernson, then the group’s vice president and general counsel, claimed Harris wanted the information “to directly harass and intimidate our donors, maybe bring audits against them, maybe deny them permits that they’re seeking,” and even inspire protests at their homes.
Harris’ office threatened to suspend their nonprofit registrations and fine their leaders. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld their rights to protect donor anonymity in a 2021 ruling.
Harris also joined an effort called AGs United for Clean Power, led by then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, in 2016. The effort aimed to “aggressively” protect “the recent progress the United States has made in combating climate change.”
In announcing the effort, Schneiderman noted that his office was investigating whether ExxonMobil broke the law by misleading the public on climate change. The coalition appears to have largely collapsed a year later, after Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker withdrew subpoenas he had issued against the conservative group the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Harris later claimed to have sued ExxonMobil, but she did not do so. Rather, Schneiderman’s successor as New York attorney general, Barbara Underwood, sued ExxonMobil in 2018.
Harris entered the U.S. Senate in 2017, and she served on the Senate Judiciary Committee. She aggressively questioned former President Donald Trump’s nominees on issues arguably unrelated to their official positions.
She repeatedly pressed Trump nominees over their membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization that upholds the Catholic Church’s position against abortion. She pressed judicial nominees Peter Phipps, Paul Matey, and Brian Buescher—all of whom were ultimately confirmed by the Senate—on whether they knew “that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?”
Harris joined her colleagues in pressing Allison Rushing, another Trump judicial nominee, about her participation in events with Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal organization. Her colleagues cited a discredited Southern Poverty Law Center accusation that the ADF is an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.” She did not cite the SPLC’s attack on ADF, but she did condemn ADF for opposing same-sex marriage and for supporting “bathroom bills” on transgender issues.
In 2018, Harris condemned many Trump judicial nominees for “extreme views,” including one who supported Kim Davis, then a county clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, who refused to personally issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples due to her belief that marriage is between one man and one woman.
She aggressively attacked then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, faulting him for even using the term “racial spoils system” in a 2000 Wall Street Journal op-ed. She claimed the term was essentially a dog whistle for “white supremacists.”
Harris served in the U.S. Senate between 2017 and 2021. She voted 100% in favor of the bills supported by the liberal Planned Parenthood Action Fund and she voted 4% in favor of bills supported by the conservative Heritage Action for America.
The environmentalist group League of Conservation Voters gave Harris a 90% lifetime rating. She received a 0% rating from the National Right to Life Committee.
GovTrack, a government watchdog, found Harris “least likely to cosponsor a bipartisan bill,” according to the Sacramento, California, Bee. GovTrack assigns an “ideology score” from 1.0 (most conservative) to 0.0 (most liberal), and Newsweek reported in 2020 that Harris had a 0.0, a score even more radical than Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who had a 0.02.
GovTrack’s analysis for the full completed terms of the 115th, 116th, and 117th Congresses, however, found Harris at 0.18, 0.06, and 0.11, respectively. Sanders had a 0.0 ideology score for each of those terms. These ratings still place Harris on the liberal side of the Senate, but not quite as extreme as the Newsweek report.
Republicans have criticized Harris for failing to achieve much as the Biden administration’s designated “border czar.”
On March 2021, Biden tasked Harris will leading the administration’s campaign to address the “root causes” of illegal immigration from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. As part of that campaign, she focused on addressing poverty, corruption, and violence.
Under Biden, millions of illegal aliens have crossed into the United States without leaving. The current administration’s policies have enabled criminals and even people on the terrorist watchlist to enter the country.
According to the White House, Harris has made progress—in getting companies to pledge investments in Central American countries. The White House announced in March that a public-private partnership the vice president led generated more than $5.2 billion in private sector commitments in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.
That money might theoretically encourage fewer Central Americans to surge the U.S.-Mexico border, but it will not secure it, nor address the illegal aliens coming here from other countries throughout the world.
Furthermore, Harris has carried water for illegal immigrants, suggesting an unwillingness to apply the law and secure the border.
In 2012, the then-attorney general of California submitted a brief supporting illegal immigrant Sergio Garcia, arguing that he should be admitted to the California State Bar, despite the bar’s rules disqualifying anyone who committed a criminal act. While Garcia was eventually admitted, it required a new law to explicitly make him eligible. Harris’ brief twisted the law before the legislature changed it to help Garcia.
In her first speech on the Senate floor in 2017, Harris declared, “An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal,” because illegal immigration is a “civil violation, not a crime.” Yet entering the country illegally has criminal penalties, and reentry without permission after deportation is a crime, as is working in the U.S. without legal residency. Overstaying a visa is a civil violation, not a criminal one.
In April 2019, Harris urged the Senate Appropriations Committee to “reduce funding for beds in the federal immigration detention system,” asserting the system had “inhumane conditions,” to refuse to hire more Border Patrol agents, and to “reduce funding for the [Trump] administration’s reckless immigration enforcement operations.”
[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]
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