(Headline USA) As California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris successfully defended the death penalty in court, despite her past crusade against it.
As a new senator, she proposed to abolish cash bail—a reversal from when she chided San Francisco judges for making it “cheaper” to commit crimes by setting bail amounts too low.
And now, as vice president and the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris’s campaign insists that she does not want to ban fracking, an oil and gas extraction process, even though that was precisely her position just a few years ago when she first pursued the White House.
Politicians often recalibrate in the face of shifting public opinions and circumstances. Across two decades in elected office and now seeking the presidency for the second time, Harris has not hesitated to stake out expedient and—at times—contradictory positions as she climbed the political ladder.
“She’s a political animal, there’s no question about it,” said Geoff Brown, a former San Francisco public defender who knew Harris during her time as a Bay Area prosecutor. “But you don’t get to be president unless you are one.”
Harris’s litany of policy reversals is opening her to attacks by Republicans and testing the strength of her pitch to voters as a truth-teller who is more credible than former President Donald Trump.
Her shifts, including on matters that she has framed as moral issues, could raise doubts about her convictions as she is reintroducing herself to the public after taking the reins of the campaign from President Joe Biden, who last month dropped out of the race.
In addition to reversing course on fracking and cash bail, Harris has changed tack on issues including the COVID-19 vaccines, health care (she supported a plan to eliminate private health insurance before she opposed it) and gun control.
She also has pivoted on her positions since joining the presidential race—not only plagiarizing at least two of Trump’s tax-cut proposals (no tax on tips and child tax credits), but suddenly taking what sounds like a hardline stance on closing the Biden administration’s open border.
“She is vulnerable to the charge of flip-flopping, no question about that,” said John Pitney, a professor of political science at Claremont McKenna College in California, who worked as a GOP congressional and political aide in the 1980s.
There is ample incentive for Republicans to attack Harris if history is a guide.
Republicans in 2004 savaged then-Sen. John Kerry for voting both for and against the same Iraq War funding bill, which they distilled down to the attack that he “was for it before [he] was against it.”
Such criticism hasn’t always resonated. In 1992, Democratic presidential hopeful Paul Tsongas attacked Bill Clinton, dismissing him days before the New Hampshire primary as a “pander bear” who “will say anything, do anything to get votes.” Clinton defeated Tsongas days later before winning two terms in the White House.
Vaccine mandates
During the 2020 vice presidential debates, then Sen. Harris declared resolutely that she had no intention of taking the vaccine if it was developed by the Trump administration.
“If Donald Trump tells us to take it, I’m not taking it,” she vowed.
Indeed, Trump’s Operation Warp Speed paid off, and within a week of the Nov. 3, 2020, election, with Biden declaring victory despite ongoing challenges, Moderna announced that its experimental mRNA vaccine was ready to go public. Two others followed in short succession—Pfizer and a traditional vaccine offered by Johnson & Johnson.
Quickly, however, questions began to arise about the necessity and safety of the shots—with much of the opposition coming from conservatives.
By the following July, Harris had completely reversed course. At a vaccine mobilization event in Detroit that month, she revealed a full reversal.
“The vaccine gave us the upper hand against this virus. And nearly 160 million Americans are now fully vaccinated, more than 4.75 million here in Michigan,” she said.
“This is incredible progress. And we need to build on that progress,” she continued. “And we need to build on that progress now, because there are still a whole lot of folks who are not yet vaccinated. And that is certainly true here in Detroit.”
With Biden increasing the harsh rhetoric against vaccine skeptics, she denounced the “misinformation” that was leading many to reject the mandates.
“Last week, the President spoke about what our administration is doing to boost vaccination rates, and basically, it boils down to two big things: We are bringing the facts—the facts—not misinformation, the facts—directly to the people,” she claimed. “And that’s a big deal, as you all know. We got to get the facts out, because sadly there’s a lot of misinformation.”
Nonetheless, Harris herself was quick to spread a demonstrable falsehood just moments later.
“Virtually every person who is in the hospital right now sick with COVID-19 is unvaccinated,” Harris lied.
“And even more, regrettably, virtually every person who has recently died from COVID-19 was unvaccinated,” she lied again. “The loss. The tragedy of that loss. Literally every person who has died from COVID-19 that we have recently been seeing was unvaccinated.”
The death penalty
One of Harris’s most pronounced shifts was over the death penalty. During a 2004 inauguration speech after her election as San Francisco’s district attorney, Harris vowed to “never charge the death penalty.” She framed her choice as a moral one.
She stuck to that pledge when a 21-year-old gang member was accused of killing San Francisco Police Officer Isaac Espinoza. Harris announced that she would not seek the ultimate punishment—a decision condemned by police and some fellow Democrats. At the officer’s funeral, Harris was forced to look on as Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein received a standing ovation when she said the death penalty was warranted.
Harris softened her approach four years later, after launching her campaign for California attorney general. Amid a tightly contested race with Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley, a Republican, Harris said she would ”enforce the death penalty as the law dictates.” While other Democrats on the ballot cruised to victory, Harris barely won.
She kept that promise. Her office successfully defended the death penalty in court, arguing she was obligated to uphold the law as the state’s top attorney—even as she refused to enforce a referendum that banned gay marriage.
‘Blood and guts prosecutor’ turned progressive
As district attorney, Harris zealously approached criminal enforcement matters. While still a candidate, she blasted the progressive incumbent, Terence Hallinan, as a “do nothing prosecutor” and called for taking more aggressive steps to police the homeless.
Once in office, she pursued the parents of chronically truant students, sought higher bail amounts and aggressively prosecuted drug crimes, earning her the nickname of “Copala.”
When a scandal erupted at the city’s crime lab involving a drug-skimming evidence technician, her office failed to promptly disclose the problem to defense attorneys, as required. She also sought to continue prosecuting the tainted cases, criticized the judge handling the matter as biased and trying to have her removed from overseeing the cases involving the technician, who had often served as an expert witness.
Harris has said she was unaware of issues with the lab, though emails released in a court case show her top deputies knew there was a problem.
“She was a blood and guts prosecutor,” said Bill Fazio, a longtime San Francisco attorney who ran against Harris in the 2003 district attorney’s race. “My history with her is she never gave away cases.”
As attorney general, Harris continued to take hardline stances on criminal justice matters. She appealed convictions that judges had ordered thrown out. Her office fought a court order mandating the release of state prisoners due to overcrowding. She also opposed legislation requiring her office to investigate shootings involving police and declined to back statewide standards for the use of body cameras by local law enforcement.
Once elected to the Senate in 2016, however, Harris jettisoned many of those positions amid speculation she would pursue the presidency. She sought instead to portray herself as a “progressive prosecutor” and proposed sweeping reforms, including abolishing the cash bail system—which her attorneys had defended in court just months before—and imposing a moratorium on the death penalty.
In May 2020, violent protests erupted in Minneapolis over the police killing of George Floyd. A police station was torched, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (who is now Harris’ running mate) eventually called in the National Guard to help quell the unrest.
In the days that followed, Harris took to the social media site Twitter, now known as X, and urged her followers to “chip in” to a bail fund to help those arrested post bond.
It’s unclear if Harris, who tweeted “End money bail” as a presidential candidate, still supports the idea. She abandoned her primary campaign in 2019 and was picked the next year to join Biden’s ticket. Her campaign declined to directly address the question.
“She believes that we need a system where public safety, not wealth, determines who should stay behind bars following an arrest. Anyone who is a danger to society should be detained regardless of how wealthy they are,” said campaign spokesman James Singer.
‘I did inhale’
Most Americans live in states where marijuana is legal in some form, and Harris is now the first major party presidential nominee to advocate for marijuana legalization.
But at different junctures of her time in office, she has been an enforcer of cannabis laws and an opponent of legalized use for adults in California.
Though she defended marijuana’s use for medicinal purposes as district attorney, her prosecutors in San Francisco convicted more than 1,900 people on cannabis-related offenses.
In 2010, when she was running to become California’s top law enforcement official, she opposed allowing marijuana sales for recreational use. At the time, she said it would cause confusion in the state’s loosely regulated medicinal marketplace.
When running for reelection as California attorney general, Harris said she did not support legalizing recreational use of marijuana—a position endorsed by her Republican challenger.
By the time she was running for president in 2019, she had reversed course and was even joking about having smoked the drug.
“I did inhale,” she quipped during a radio interview, referring to smoking pot in her college days, twisting a line Bill Clinton used in his 1992 campaign to deflect criticism that he had used the drug.
Earlier this year, she said it’s “absurd” that the federal government classifies marijuana as more dangerous than fentanyl, and she criticized the federal classification of cannabis as “patently unfair.”
Harris has undergone an “evolution in thought on the issue that is representative of the American public at large,” said Morgan Fox, political director for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML.
With most American adults supporting legalization, Fox said, “it’s not surprising that any particular politician also would.”
Gun buyback support backfires
Although she still supports gun control measures that would violate the Second Amendment, Harris has softened her stance somewhat on the issue, falling in line with the majority of Democrats.
Since becoming vice president, she has pulled back from her support for mandatory gun buy-back programs, which helped her stand out in a crowded 2019 Democratic primary—in which she later had the dubious distinction of being the first to drop out.
Harris supported forcing millions of gun owners to sell their AR-15s and similar firearms to the government, a proposal that found little support among other Democrats or gun-safety advocates.
She now advocates for universal background checks on gun sales and “red flag” laws that generally allow family members or law enforcement officers to seek a court order restricting gun access to those posing an immediate risk to themselves or public safety.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
