Judge Glock: Kamalanomics The presumptive presidential nominee is no moderate.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/analysis-of-kamala-harris-economic-record
While Joe Biden campaigned as a moderate, he has governed as one of the most progressive presidents in modern American history. In 2020, Biden sought to distance himself from self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders; after Biden as president pursued massive stimulus and spending programs, Sanders became one of his biggest supporters.
Now that Biden has announced that he will not pursue reelection, the Democratic nomination will likely fall to his vice president, Kamala Harris. While Harris may campaign as a moderate, analysis of her economic record does not support that label.
In her time in the Senate, Harris positioned herself on the far left of a Democratic Party already moving sharply to the left. According to DW-NOMINATE, a measure that compares the votes of senators and representatives and ranks members from -1 (most liberal) to 1 (most conservative) Harris was the second-most liberal member of the Senate when she served from 2017 to 2021, behind only Elizabeth Warren. In fact, her overall voting record is more liberal than that of Bernie Sanders. Though it is difficult to compare members across time, Harris’s score (-0.709), which is based largely on economic votes, ranks among the more left-wing in American history.
Harris’s senatorial record differs starkly from that of her boss. While Biden shifted left on entering the White House, he remained a moderate across his nearly four-decade Senate career. His approximate -0.3 DW-NOMINATE score put him close to the middle of his party throughout his time in the upper chamber.
When Harris was in the Senate, she introduced and co-sponsored bills that would have dramatically shifted U.S. policy leftward. In 2019, she unveiled a $10 trillion plan to reduce greenhouse gases to zero by 2045—five years faster than proposed in the uber-progressive Green New Deal. Harris also advocated for an end to fracking, a measure that, had it taken effect, would have stopped about two-thirds of all oil production in the United States.
Her health-care record is similarly progressive. In 2017, Harris co-sponsored Sanders’s “Medicare for All” bill, which would have ended private insurance in America; “It’s just the right thing to do,” she said of her support for the bill. In preparation for her 2020 presidential campaign, she released a new plan that still would have extended Medicare to all Americans but that allowed private insurers to offer a plan within the government-run system. Both proposals were on the left of the Democratic Party, even the increasingly liberal party of the past five years.
Indeed, Harris was not shy about tacking further left than her progressive compatriots. Whereas Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s 2019 “FAMILY Act” would have provided three months of paid family leave at 66 percent of workers’ salaries on taxpayers’ dime, Harris proposed supporting up to six months of leave at up to 100 percent of workers’ income. She introduced the “Housing Is Infrastructure Act” in 2019, which would have spent $100 billion on new housing, including $70 billion set aside for publicly owned units. She also supported Sanders’s plan to make community colleges and even four-year public universities free for students from low- and middle-income families, despite an exorbitant price tag that Sanders said would amount to “at least $48 billion per year.”
The then-California senator was especially radical during the pandemic. For example, she proposed $2,000 per month per person in free cash for the vast majority of U.S. households. She also introduced a bill that would have capped price increases at 10 percent during national emergencies. Had it been in force amid the inflationary period after the pandemic, such a policy could have created massive shortages across the economy.
Harris’s rise to become the likely presidential nominee of the Democratic Party represents in some ways a return to the early days of 2020. In the last presidential campaign, Democrats scared by the socialist leanings and unlikely electability of early front-runner Bernie Sanders rallied behind Joe Biden as an electable moderate. The irony is that now Democrats worried about Biden’s electability have rallied behind Harris, whose economic record almost mirrors that of Sanders. Her nomination would represent a triumph of tendencies once relegated to the party’s progressive left.
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