Even for original and continuing Never Trumpers, there is compelling reason not to vote for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris: She appears to be a clear and present danger to the Constitution.
This Never Trumper sees dangers from the Harris-Walz ticket, some of them severe, to the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments, perhaps the Fourteenth Amendment, and to significant structural essentials of the main body of the Constitution.
And that’s before even considering all her radical policy preferences, both domestic and foreign, not to mention her anti-Catholicism or her unforgivable cheap-shotting of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh both after and before ludicrous sexual assault claims were aired against him. And more.
Let’s start with Harris’ threats to the First Amendment, which are the most obvious and egregious. She has shown hostility to all four of its guaranteed freedoms — of speech, of the press, of assembly (or “association”), and of religious exercise.
Just this week, Harris repeated an anti-free-exercise attitude that should scare anybody and everybody. Asked point blank if she would recognize “religious exemptions” of the sort that would excuse devoutly traditionalist Christian doctors from performing abortions, she said, “I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body.” This is consistent with a law she introduced in 2019, and with a policy the Biden-Harris administration tried to impose unilaterally in 2022 before being blocked by the courts.
This refusal to recognize religious exemptions, even for cases where a doctor believes he would be committing murder, should be anathema for anybody, whether pro-life or pro-choice, who has the slightest appreciation for what liberty means, not to mention basic decency. This isn’t about abortion per se, but about state compulsion. It is one thing for government to prohibit personal actions injurious to others, but a different and profoundly dangerous thing for government to be able to compel action against one’s faith or conscience.
Even in the one situation where state compulsion has been accepted in virtually every society since time immemorial — that of conscripting citizens for the common defense — this nation always has allowed for “conscientious objectors” who serve stateside or as medics instead. Again, even for people who believe there is a “right” to an abortion, Harris’s position should be recognized as a moral monstrosity.
Meanwhile, where freedom of assembly and of speech intersect, in what the Supreme Court describes as the “freedom of association,” Harris is so radical that the high court rebuked a stance she took that would negate a landmark victory not of some right-wing group but of the NAACP. And where modern-day press, in the form of social media, intersects with speech, Harris and running mate Tim Walz both repeatedly have insisted that government should be able to demand that platforms pre-censor content and also that “hate speech” should be curtailed.
On the Second Amendment, Harris is infamous for advocating “mandatory buy-backs” of certain weapons. On the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, Harris’s entire record, wherein she repeatedly pushes to nationalize almost every issue and law, is hostile to principles of federalism and of “rights retained by the people.”
Worth mentioning here, while discussing the few but important unenumerated rights, privileges, and immunities the Constitution always has assumed, and the Supreme Court always has endorsed, is that the Biden-Harris administration’s hostility toward parental rights is one of the most dangerous trends in the history of American policy and lawfare. Just this week, the Daily Signal, in focusing at length on this terrible trend, reported that in 2023, the Justice Department issued a grant that the publication described as “encourag[ing] judges to adopt an ideological framework that pits children against parents who do not support their self-selected identities.”
As with the free exercise of religion, the underlying principle here isn’t about the specific political flashpoint, meaning abortion or transgenderism, but about the basic rights involved — here, the rights of parents, which are a hallmark of the civilized world.
As for the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments, they all involve aspects of criminal or civil justice and fair trials. Without focusing on each provision involved, suffice it to say that Harris, as a prosecutor, was a train wreck on these fronts.
Granted, Harris has a bizarre multiple-personality on crime. On the one hand, her general approach as a self-proclaimed “progressive prosecutor” involved her being soft on whole areas of crime and embracing radical anti-bail organizations and “defund the police” efforts. On the other hand, when it comes to using the whole weight of government to make examples of people she targets or to protect her own turf, that’s where she is willing to jettison almost any procedural protection.
The gold standard of analysis in her rights-trampling record came in a 2019 column not in some right-wing publication but in the liberal New York Times, by law professor Lara Bazelon. The key summary quote: “Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.” In one example, Bazelon wrote that Harris tried to cover up wrongdoing by a lab technician. In the end, judges ruled against Harris and threw out a stunning 600 cases because of the lab technician’s violations.
On a direct and personal level, Harris has shown an extreme disregard for fairness and decency in making accusations and even by pre-judging guilt. While essentially endorsing riots about the situation, she insisted that a policeman in Wisconsin “should be charged” for shooting knife-wielding Jacob Blake — only for her own administration’s Justice Department to join the rest of law enforcement in deciding the officer had done nothing deserving of criminal prosecution.
And when opposing Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh, no tactic was too low for Harris, no smear off limits. It wasn’t just that she embraced the extremely dubious story of Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford. She also gave credence to and demanded an FBI investigation into the palpably ludicrous and despicably calumnious allegations that Kavanaugh participated in gang rape events at Atlantic beach parties.
Most discrediting, though, was an episode Harris engineered even before Ford came forward. It needs to be re-seen to be believed. Repeatedly insinuating that Kavanaugh had some sort of unethical or illegal contact with an unnamed employee of a huge law firm, but while refusing to name the employee or why anything was amiss, Harris repeatedly berated Kavanaugh for not admitting a connection that a purportedly impeccable source supposedly had told her was nefarious.
The entire goal was to make Kavanaugh look evasive and dishonest. Yet, after the entire, extended episode was over, and after generating numerous negative headlines about Kavanaugh, Harris never again raised the issue or specified her concern. Two San Francisco Chronicle news reporters saw through the ruse, though, in a piece titled “Kamala Harris’ viral grilling of Kavanaugh ends with a thud.” No court of law ever would have allowed the content-less, slanderous grilling that Harris imposed on the nominee.
When you are her target, you are her target; all truth and fairness and procedural rules be damned.
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So, even before being frightened by Harris’s extremist record as the most left-wing member of the Senate, as someone willing to consider racial reparations, push non-sensical leftist economics, sympathize with radical student protesters, deliberately let in millions of illegal immigrants, pack the Supreme Court, explode the filibuster, and embrace the $83 billion Green New Deal, among a host of other awful policies… again, even before all that, Harris fails the bedrock test of dedication to protect and defend the Constitution.
Harris may be right that former President Donald Trump is, in different ways, a “threat to democracy.” So, however, is she. Manifestly and alarmingly so.