With Kamala Harris more than likely emerging as the democratic nominee for President of the United States replacing the 81-year-old Joe Biden, Republicans are struggling with talking points to attack the Vice President and former California Senator.
On Truth Social, Donald Trump complained that the GOP should be “reimbursed for fraud” after spending most of their time going after Biden while spending an entire convention going after the current President. The former President and GOP nominee also wants the next presidential debate moved to Fox News presumably because he thinks he’d have some advantage over Harris.
Meanwhile, other right and far-right fronts are attacking Harris’ supposed predisposition to laugh halfway through a sentence while Jason Miller believes she would enact a ban on plastic straws. Additionally, The opposition criticized Team Trump for making fun of Harris describing her outfit to a group of disability activists, including some who were blind. Sadly, there is also a lot of unfiltered racism online, and more is undoubtedly on the way.
Harris has plenty to go on, the problem is it’s probably not going to work for Republicans
Obviously, Harris isn’t some unknown on the political scene, she has an extensive record as a public servant. Not to mention she ran an incredibly disappointing campaign in 2019 having to drop out before a single ballot in the Democratic primary was cast. The problem with Kamala’s record and the Republican’s ability to go after it resides in the notion that her “tough on crime” criticisms when she was a prosecutor in California would probably sit well with the party that describes itself as the “Law and Order” faction of U.S. politics.
Take this CNN article from 2019:
Digging into Harris’ long and complex record as district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California, University of San Francisco associate law professor Lara Bazelon took central aim at Harris’ contention that she was a “progressive prosecutor,” who sought to right injustice and change the criminal justice system from within.
“Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent,” wrote Bazelon, the former director of Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent. “Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.”
Or this New York Times OpEd from 2019 when then Californian AG Kamala Harris argued against a federal judge in Orange County that deeming the death penalty as unconstitutional “undermines important protections that our courts provide to defendants.”
Ms. Harris was similarly regressive as the state’s attorney general. When a federal judge in Orange County ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional in 2014, Ms. Harris appealed. In a public statement, she made the bizarre argument that the decision “undermines important protections that our courts provide to defendants.” (The approximately 740 men and women awaiting execution in California might disagree).
Nonetheless, it would be incredibly odd to see a Republican presidential candidate argue against being “tough on crime” or the death penalty.
However, it’s a record that Harris will have to answer to when it comes to principled progressives who aren’t ready to “Vote Blue No Matter Who”. That and her stance when it comes to the genocide in Gaza which she has had a hand in, rising medical costs, and the U.S. war machine.
