The problem with the Harris-Walz ticket’s cowardly ducking of media questions, all while Vice President Kamala Harris has repeatedly said her “values have not changed,” is that her values run counter to the American tradition.
Indeed, her values and Walz’s values together are frightening.
Before going any further, perhaps this disclaimer is important: I was an original Never Trumper and remain one to this day, so this is not part of some “let’s elect Trump again” agenda. This is just equal-opportunity insistence that presidential candidates owe clarity to voters and that standards and principles be applied equally to all sides.
Voters should feel extremely insulted by the Harris-Walz game of “hide” while the liberal media refuse to “seek.” Never in the electronic media age has a major party put forth a nominee who never had to work for the nomination and then refused to take serious media questions, all while her campaign aides repeatedly say, without explanation, that she has abandoned a boatload of her earlier policy choices. Worse, when she is given chances to explain the shifts, she not only doesn’t reveal her thinking but says her values haven’t changed — an obvious ploy to take both sides of issues. If voters like her old values, she still has them! If voters don’t like her old positions based on those values, she has new ones!
Harris may as well be selling beachfront property that is on a mountaintop, a vegan diet with the best ribeye steaks available, and a purple evening gown in camouflage colors for a deer-hunting trip. And the liberal media not only refuse to question these obvious contradictions but, as my colleague Byron York noted, claim that those who do want answers are the ones who lack “real moral clarity.”
For someone asking to be the leader of the free world, it is virtually obscene both for her to duck and dodge this way and for the media to cheer on her ducks and dodges.
All we can do, then, is take her at her word. No matter what “position” her campaign now claims Harris has, or Walz has, on fracking, mandatory gun buybacks, the $50 trillion-plus “Green New Deal,” or all her other complete policy reversals, nobody with her original and still unchanged “values” should be president.
If your “values” ever, ever told you that the government should be able to force you to sell your guns to it while banning all handguns, and those values haven’t changed, your values run directly counter to the self-defense principle embedded in the Second Amendment.
Much worse are her values and those of Walz, then and now, related to First Amendment speech protections. In one case in which she trampled First Amendment rights in contradiction of a hard-fought victory by the NAACP (yes, she is so extreme that she went far to the left of a landmark victory by the civil rights organization), the Supreme Court shot her down, hugely. She also called on social media companies to censor political opponents’ speech, going much further even than left-wing icon Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Meanwhile, Walz actually bragged that he signed a law he said can make employers “go to jail now” if they discuss “religious or political matters” at mandatory meetings.
Harris is awful on other elements of the Bill of Rights, too, such as the rights of criminal defendants and important safeguards for fair trials. The Los Angeles Times reported “an epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct” on her watch, and she had a terrible habit of refusing to overturn obviously wrongful convictions.
Harris’s support for the Green New Deal was the wrong value not just on the $50 trillion cost but on the dangerous scope of government command-and-control. Her embrace of Medicare for All put her on a side that would have been not just economically disastrous but surely would have led to rationing and a massive hindrance to the development of life-saving drugs.
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Meanwhile, as I’ve noted previously, Walz has signed legislation whereby his state would initially side against parents who object to their children’s gender “transitions” and also signed a bill that removed from state law a requirement that doctors try to save the lives of babies born alive, breathing the air of day, after botched abortions.
On these issues and so much else, the values of Harris and Walz were, are, and should be anathema to most people. Those values themselves, no less than the candidates’ refusal to take questions on them, bode ill for constitutional governance.