Opinion

DHILLON: Biden Found The Only VP Pick Less Principled Than Him

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Harmeet K. Dhillon Republican National Lawyers Association
Font Size:

Joe Biden, in a way, has found the perfect running mate. Kamala Harris may be the only prominent politician in America with fewer guiding principles and a greater pure lust for power than Biden himself.

Like Biden, Harris has shifted from doing a “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” act to presenting herself as the wokest kid on the block in an effort to win over the Bernie Sanders voters and the Black Lives Matter/defund the police crowd.

The primary difference is that it took Joe Biden a number of decades to go from “lock the S.O.Bs up” and “every major crime bill since 1976 … has had the name of the Democratic senator from the State of Delaware: Joe Biden” in the early 1990s to insisting the police are “systemically racist” and in need of “revolutionary institutional change” today.

Kamala Harris is far more efficient — she transformed in about 10 minutes from supposed “top cop” to playing bleeding-heart progressive for the cameras. It was only a few years ago as attorney general of California she was — in the word of one liberal law professor — “weaponizing technicalities” to keep people in prison for as long as possible and squeezing as much dirt-cheap prison labor out of the system as she could. Today she’s marching with BLM activists who chant for the deaths of the same cops she used to work with and pushing slavery reparations in Congress as well.

It might seem confusing. There doesn’t seem to be any common denominator. You might have many questions!

It certainly isn’t “the rule of law” that drives Harris. She was perfectly willing to disregard the law whenever enforcing it might inconvenience any favored constituency — the cheap labor, open borders lobby for example. She dutifully carried out San Francisco’s, and later California’s, “sanctuary” policies to undermine federal immigration enforcement, and even asked the California Supreme Court to admit an illegal immigrant as an attorney despite clear rules against that. As a senator, she’s also called for decriminalizing illegal border crossing, instituting a total amnesty for past immigration offenders and has compared the ICE agents to Ku Klux Klan members.

Those who fit into a voting block she’s not wooing, like the pro-life activists she sought to put in jail for taking undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officials, weren’t so lucky. Those unjust prosecutions continue, even after the favor she did for her abortion industry donors is in the rear view mirror.

Harris’s conduct also can’t be reduced to the simple tough-on-crime, law and order rhetoric that won her the support of moderates and even some Republicans in her first races against California progressive types. For every cruel publicity stunt she pulled to show how hard she could be — such as locking up parents whose kids didn’t show up to school and seeking jail for marijuana defendants at a time the country and especially California were moving away from that kind of thinking — there’s an example of her going soft when she thought it could make herself look progressive. For instance, she refused to seek the death penalty against cop killer Isaac Espinoza and MS-13 triple murderer Edwin Ramos in one of her first betrayals of her campaign promises while running for office. That campaign trail is littered with abandoned positions, promises, and collateral damage.

By this campaign season, she’s gone far beyond just legalizing marijuana and is now entertaining notions such as decriminalizing prostitution, demanding the abolition of cash bail and the death penalty, and “defunding the police.” She has even expressed interest in the idea of letting convicted felons vote from behind bars.

But despite recent forays into the far-left on criminal justice issues, it’s not genuine progressive principles that motivate Kamala, either. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard was able to eviscerate Harris’s “progressive prosecutor” posturing and end her short-lived momentum during the Democratic primaries for a reason: her act doesn’t comport with reality.

There is, in fact, no unifying principle behind Kamala Harris’s career except the ruthless pursuit of political advantage.

Harris’ game is often one of racial and ethnic pandering combined with sappy grievance mongering to get white liberals nodding along. It’s one she learned in the San Francisco Bay, where many of the richest, most-liberal white people on Earth step over some of the country’s most desperate homeless to get on corporate shuttles and ride past neighborhoods full of the sanctuary-shielded illegal immigrants to reach their elite corporate “campuses.” Worse, it’s a model of politics she hopes to export to the rest of America.

If anyone should know Harris’s true nature, it’s Joe Biden. Not only did she try to humiliate him on the debate stage by “not” calling him a racist and accusing him of standing with segregationists against her as a little girl, but even when her name began to be floated as a potential VP pick, she tried to turn it into a sexism accusation against Biden. She also infamously declared that she believed Tara Reade, the former Senate staffer who accused Biden of sexually assaulting her.

Clearly, Biden didn’t take it personally. He knows another political operator when he sees one. And, when selecting the woman who very likely would succeed him as president some time before he would leave office at the age of 86 after two terms, Kamala Harris’s cold, unprincipled political calculation is an obvious asset. Perhaps — as they say in Silicon Valley — it’s a feature, not a bug.

Harmeet K. Dhillon is a nationally recognized lawyer focusing on commercial litigation, employment law, First Amendment rights, and election law matters. She is the National Co-Chair of the Republican National Lawyers Association.