Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden announced that he picked California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket.
The announcement is being heralded as the safe choice and one that brings some optimism. Harris is the daughter of two immigrant professors. She was raised by a single mother. In kindergarten, she participated in a busing desegregation program that sent her to a nearly all-white school.
Harris later had a successful criminal justice career, rising to become California’s attorney general. She then became the second black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. Now, she’s the first black female and Asian-American to be a vice presidential nominee. One could look at her as the embodiment of the American Dream.
Yet, Harris supports policies that would take away the dreams and livelihoods of many other Americans like her.
Senator Harris supports a Green New Deal. She introduced similar legislation to a Green New Deal bill she refused to support when it was brought to the Senate floor, opting to vote present instead. She also partnered with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to introduce legislation that provided specific protections for so-called “front-line communities” as part of any Green New Deal bill.
As we know, the Green New Deal is a bad deal for workers and families. According to modest estimates just one part of the Green New Deal would cost an average family $165,000 and wipe out 5.2 million jobs with negligible climate benefits. This doesn’t even include the taxpayer costs. The costs of this climate change plan is a burden too heavy for most families to bear.
Harris supports other policies such as Medicare-for-All, tax increases (reversing the recent tax cuts), and workplace mandates (including the union-friendly PRO Act) that would erode opportunities for women, young people, and people of color.
We have not even touched on her criminal justice record, which is no longer acceptable to many liberals.
What Harris does offer to leftists is that she checks two key diversity boxes: female and black. It’s sad that their view of diversity is so narrowly defined as gender and race, especially when the Left suffers a deficiency of diversity of thought but overindulges in intolerance towards independent-thinking minorities.
Today, people celebrate her selection based on gender and race for its symbolism. In the end, women and people of color care most about issues. On the issues, Harris will not push them ahead.