Post #6874 Commentary: My Never Harris Stand

I have never liked Kamala Harris or, for that matter, any California progressive. I have never forgotten or forgiven California for basically stealing from me during the 18 months I lived in California. (I never wanted to move to California in the first place; I was subcontracting out of Chicago. In my client boss' "job offer by extortion", I was about to leave Friday for my flight back when he told me not to come back Monday if I didn't accept his surprise job offer. In fact, I had a no-compete clause in my agency contract,) Their revenue division stole from me in 2 ways: They had a disability payroll tax which I had hit the cap with my first of 4 employers in 2000. They disallowed my credit for doubling the contribution with the other 3 employers. When I objected, they argued that somehow they had lost my W-2's and I had the burden of proof. Note they weren't disputing my income from any of the employers. They said they couldn't get that information from my former employers. It turned out my tax records scans were unusable and my physical copies were in one of 40 sealed moving boxes. I don't recall the amount :$250-500. Then they wanted a 10% cut on the installments of my ROTH IRA conversion I had made earlier in Illinois, with no intention of ever moving to California. It was bad enough my Roth IRA was under water. California was one of the few states taxing conversions, and some California judicial whore ruled since CA did not chase after taxpayers leaving with ongoing installments, they could collect on incoming installments of non-California  income conversions. I don't recall the exact amount they taxed me but I think it was like $2000. So when I left in 2001, I vowed I wouldn't let them see another dime. In 2016-2017 I lived a mile from their east border, but never crossed it once. I've repeatedly rejected dozens if not hundreds of job opportunities in California.

But, off course, unscrupulous tax collectors aren't even my biggest issue with the People's Republic of California. I earlier tweeted a tongue-in-cheek suggestion to the Trump campaign that Harris wants "to make America California again". There's nothing admirable about Statism, about the rejection of individual autonomy. Biden had posed as a centrist, but he has governed from the left. Kamala Harris has never made a pretense of being a progressive US Senator .Here is Harris on the govtrack ideology scale::  

She has been a passionate tax and spender and an ideological climate action warrior, willing to limit consumer choices in energy and appliances:

Climate action has run through Harris’s career for decades. As California’s attorney general, Harris sued big oil companies like BP and ConocoPhillips, and investigated Exxon Mobil for its role in climate change disinformation. While in the Senate, she sponsored the Green New Deal resolution. And as vice president, Harris made the crucial tie-breaking vote to pass Democrats’ historic climate bill.

Whereas Kamala Harris didn't fully embrace the "defund the police" movement in the aftermath of George Floyd, she tried to pay lip service to the movement, vaguely talking about reimaging public safety and reallocating some police funding. She has been similarly squishy on ICE funding.

She has called for further nationalizing healthcare with her version of Medicare for All, just differing from Comrade Bernie (she initially cosponsored) in not calling for the elimination of private insurance entities.. Her policy flip flops go beyond healthcare but also include legalization of marijuana, fracking, exempting tip income, immigration, etc.

We libertarians are particularly contemptuous of Harris' political opportunism and misleading rhetoric, while channeling her inner illiberal Statist:

These tendencies include a penchant for saying one thing during campaigns and then doing the opposite; of using the state to crack down on problems—like truancy and drug use—that many would agree could be better solved through nonpunitive approaches; and of using moral panics around sex in self-serving ways (even while publicly ignoring sexual misconduct among California cops). They include acting cavalierly toward the Constitution, defending dirty prosecutors, and finding new ways for the government to poke into people's lives.

Remember: Not only did Harris help put the parents of truant kids in jail, but she wrote in her 2019 book The Truths We Hold that "instituting a statewide plan on truancy was part of the reason I'd run for the office in the first place." That is who Kamala Harris is (though she claims the jailing was unintended).

During her 28-year tenure as a county prosecutor, district attorney (D.A.), and state attorney general (A.G.),…in the public eye, she spoke of racial justice and liberal values, bolstering her cred as one of the Democratic Party's rising stars. But behind closed doors, she repeatedly fought for more aggressive prosecution not just of violent criminals but of people who committed misdemeanors and "quality of life" crimes.

Every attorney general fights for state power and police prerogatives. It's part of the job. But over and over again, Harris went beyond the call of duty, fighting for harsher sentences, larger bail requirements, longer prison terms, more prosecution of petty crimes, greater criminal justice involvement in low-income and minority communities, less due process for people in the system, less transparency, and less accountability for bad cops.

In the early days of her [2020] presidential campaign, Harris has sought to define herself as a liberal reformer who has kept up with the times. But a review of her career shows a distinct penchant for power seeking and an illiberal disposition in which no offense is small or harmless enough to warrant lenience from the state. Now she wants to bring that approach to the highest office in the land.

And finally Harris has been exploiting the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, restoring governance over abortion to the states for the first time in nearly 50 years, (I've come to realize as a pro-lifer my position is shared probably by a minority of people; even a number of pro-lifers are concerned about state intervention, never mind the majority of pro-abort libertarians). Now technically POTUS and the Congress have nothing to do with abortion: that's what the Dobbs decision is all about. The fact is, the only way to legislate the issue would be to amend the Constitution which requires a super-majority vote in Congress which isn't going to happen for either side, never mind ratifying it in a super-majority of states, many of them red.

Harris is trying to hype the bogeyman of a nation abortion "ban". Neither codification of Roe or a "ban" would be likely to survive a filibuster, never mind SCOTUS scrutiny. And let's not forget when Trump ran for the Reform Party nomination in 2000, he promoted himself as "pro-choice".

People can vote for who they want for POTUS for any reason, including Harris' nominating justices different from Trump's. But Harris is using the issue disingenuously.