MICHAEL WHATLEY: Don’t Be Fooled — Kamala Is A Radical

On July 21, President Joe Biden finally acknowledged the reality of his cognitive decline, announcing that he would not seek re-election and endorsing his Vice President Kamala Harris to run against former President Donald Trump.

Since that day, most of the mainstream media has labored day and night to convince the American people that Kamala Harris – who has had low approval ratings – has secretly been a political superstar all along. The American people won’t buy it.

Here is what matters about Kamala Harris: She is a textbook San Francisco radical progressive whose policies are jarringly out-of-step with the American people.

Take energy and the economy. When Biden and Harris came into office in 2021, they immediately declared war on American energy, demoting America from energy dominance to pleading for oil from around the world and leading to skyrocketing gas prices. While American families were struggling to fill up their cars, Harris was touting an international agreement to phase out fossil fuels completely. During her time in the Senate, Harris supported the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, which wiped out 11,000 jobs and stopped 830,000 barrels of oil per day from coming to America. From backing a ban on fracking – which supports hundreds of thousands of jobs in states like Pennsylvania – to attacking offshore drilling, Harris has never seen a source of American energy that she has not tried to restrict, regardless of the cost to American families.

Don’t forget Harris’s central role in delivering Bidenomics – groceries are up 21.2 percent, rent is up 21.2 percent, and electricity is up 29 percent since Biden and Harris took office. Americans could not afford Harris as vice president, and they certainly cannot afford her in the Oval Office.

Harris’ dangerously liberal record looks even worse when it comes to crime. She went on the record and praised the defund the police movement, claiming that it is “outdated” and “wrongheaded” to think that more policing will make communities safer. While she was representing California in the Senate, the Democrat mayor of Los Angeles cut $150 million in funding for the L.A. police. How did Harris respond? “I applaud [Mayor] Eric Garcetti for doing what he’s done,” she said. “We’ve got to reexamine what we’re doing with American taxpayer dollars.” Naturally, violent crime in Los Angeles skyrocketed after the police budget was slashed.

When Black Lives Matter rioters were burning down cities across America in 2020, Harris even went so far as to publicly fundraise for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a left-wing group that freed dangerous felons accused of murder and sexual assault. Harris’s record on crime could not be clearer. Every time the left has tried to dismantle public safety – by defunding the police, doing away with cash bail  – Harris has been there cheerleading from the start.

Above all, Harris’ time as “Border Czar” has shown the devastating extent of her radical incompetence. In 2021, Biden and Harris moved quickly to undo 94 Trump-era executive orders, halt the construction of a border wall, and end the successful “Remain in Mexico” policy. Since then, chaos has reigned on Harris’s watch: more than ten million illegal immigrants have flooded into our country including 375 people on the FBI’s Terrorist Watch List. Fentanyl has flowed across our open border and poisoned our communities, killing tens of thousands of Americans; migrant crime has dominated headlines as illegal immigrants kill American citizens. This was all by design.

Before taking power in the White House, Harris advocated for decriminalizing border crossings, loudly supported sanctuary cities, and said that an illegal immigrant “should not be deported” if they do not commit a crime. As a senator, she compared Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) officers to the KKK. While she was vice president, the administration sued Texas for protecting its southern border and unilaterally paroled over a million illegal immigrants. She has fundamentally betrayed her obligation to the American people.

Destroying American energy and crushing your pocketbook. Putting dangerous criminals ahead of citizens. Unleashing deadly chaos at the southern border. Harris’ policies are drastically out of step with the American mainstream.

Michael Whatley is Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.