Morning Wire - Kamala Harris' “Dangerously Liberal” Record | 9.8.24

Episode Date: September 8, 2024

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts breaks down Kamala Harris' involvement in far-left policies that have led to economic strain, rising crime, and a border crisis, all of which voters need to understand before the election. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kamala Harris is running the most compressed presidential campaign in history, being handed the nomination by Joe Biden less than four months until the election. Since then, she's largely avoided getting specific on policies and repeatedly disavowed many of the ones she ran on in 2019 and implemented under the Biden-Harris administration. In this episode, we talk with the president of the Heritage Foundation, which has launched a new initiative detailing Harris's policy positions so voters can be more informed about where she stands on all the key issues.

I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's September 8th, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire. Joining us now is Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation. Kevin, thank you so much for coming on. So the clock is really ticking on this election, and your foundation has created a new website called Dangerously Liberal. You say this highlights what you're calling the Biden-Harris administration's failed liberal policies. First, what prompted your team to create this website?

What prompted us to create dangerously liberal.com is the utter dearth of policy conversation by the radical left. They want to run away from their policy record because combined all those policies have undermined the American dream. So we thought we would place a real emphasis on Vice President Harris's role in her official capacity in these terrible policies. And we're hopeful that we've injected some policy substance into the conversation. And what are some of those policies that she's been directly involved with? Unfortunately, for the everyday American, she's responsible for instituting policies that have damaged the economy, that have opened the southern border, that have created lawlessness in the cities, of course, dating all the way back to what she says or her fame days as

the Attorney General of California. She's really the architect of defund the police. And ultimately, when you put those two things together, the lawlessness, the border in our cities, our suburbs, along with the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act and Green New Deal that have caused inflation to be at record highs. The everyday American, regardless of their politics, look at the Biden-Harris administration and ask, why did you do this to us? Dangerously Liberal.com provides everyday Americans with the information they need to make an informed decision this fall.

You bring up the Inflation Reduction Act, which we were told was supposed to bring down inflation, obviously, that did not happen. We've actually seen record numbers in recent years. Your team dug into those numbers. What did you find in terms of the economy and inflation under this administration? Well, in short, President Biden and Vice President Harris inherited a thriving economy, one that was beginning to rebound from the COVID shutdowns. And what our economist team at Heritage have discovered is that the inflation that we've all suffered from over the last three and a half years was avoidable, just like it was in the 1970s, the late 1970s, the corollary between the Carter years and the Biden Harris years, unfortunately,

is very strong. This is the key point. When the federal government spends money it doesn't have, it literally has to print more dollars. And when it does that, the price of everything goes up, the price of groceries, the price of gas. I think each month, as we receive our electric bills, we can understand the direct correlation between implementing artificial subsidies of alternative forms of energy that aren't yet mature enough for the market and the fact that that causes all of our rates to increase. Ultimately, it's more expensive to live life as an everyday American as a result of Harris's economic regime. So by average, what are inflationary costs right now? How much has inflation risen over the last three and a half years? The last computation,

our economist team came up with was that all of the Biden Harris spending in three and a half years has cost each individual American household $1,400 a year. Like you said, most of us really see these increases when we go to buy gas and groceries, often 20% on many items and as high as 50% for some. Now, to turn to the border crisis, we've continued to hear about the historic illegal immigration during the Biden Harris administration. What are the numbers there? Well, the official estimates are that just north of 11 million illegal aliens have entered the country.

Conservative estimates by public policy professionals, including some I work with, target the real number to be closer to 20 million. But let's just say that it is 11.3 million. Those are 11.3 million, 100% of whom have broken the law by coming here. They've taken American jobs, especially in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan and Nevada and Georgia, Arizona. Even more importantly than that, let's just say you live in a city or a county where you don't see a lot of illegal aliens, even accounting for the fact we have nothing against them as human persons, we want them to come here legally, we understand that the arrival of those people undermines the rule of law in this country. And you simply can't turn on the news in any 24-hour period and not see another violent crime committed by an illegal alien.

Though that doesn't mean that all of them are violent criminals, it obviously underscores for the average American, that this is a huge problem. It is a policy albatross that ought to be put around figuratively the neck of the vice president because she's the biggest advocate for this other than the president himself. We've seen a recent report that in New York, something like 75% of the arrests involve suspected illegal immigrants at this point. Pretty stunning. In terms of Harris's role in the immigration crisis, she was famously dubbed the Bordersar. It's not her official title, but the title that the media once embraced. What role did she actually play and can she really claim to have not been the borders are? Well, gosh, your colleagues at Axios

called her the borders are, so it must be true. And now they all want to reverse course and say that never happened. Every American who paid attention to the news in 2021 understood that the president of the United States gave the vice president that role. And in fact, she had a much balihood role in supposedly ending the illegal immigration origins in central America. That obviously did not. not happen. She's not gone to the border. I actually think that she understands fully the policy because she understands that having millions of illegal aliens here not only will, of course, aid the voter rolls of the radical left. It allows the left to expand the safety net programs that, while good an intention for people who need those programs temporarily, are on the verge of bankruptcy.

When Americans begin connecting the dots between her role as the borders are and where we are, and where we are now as a country economically and also in terms of the rule of law. In other words, when Americans really home in on the policy substance of this election, I think they're going to hold the vice president accountable and she deserves every bit of it. Now, you mentioned that you actually started this website in part because specific policy discussions have been sort of avoided by the Harris campaign. We did hear her presenting a lot of policies in 2019 when she initially ran for president. She's since walked back many of those. But what are some of those ideas? But what are some of those is that she's endorsed. Defund the police. She's had to run away from because not only has it always

been unpopular, but we now see the effects of that several years in. Secondly, she's actively running away from her green energy program because they're wildly unpopular now that we've seen the inflationary consequence of these policies. Thirdly, as has been in the news the last days and weeks, she's one of the biggest advocates for DEI, for diversity, equity, and inclusion in a country where we've made such great strides for equality. Forget the nonsense of equity, which is just a radical left way of saying, we're going to reorder society so that there's no meritocracy. She's now running away from that. She's running away from those policy records so quickly. I think if you give her another week or two, Vice President Harris might start sounding like a

conservative. Why does she want to rebuild herself that way? Because conservative policies absolutely allow the everyday American to prosper. They help to revitalize the American dream. Dangerously Liberal.com, however, tells the truth. It's what Heritage always does, which is to place an emphasis on policy, and the vice president can't run away from that record. Speaking of policy messaging with her campaign, Harris has used Project 2025 produced by Heritage as a bludgeon against Trump. She's tried to portray it in a very extreme manner. What is Project 2025, really? And is it something that you believe the Trump presidency would eventually align with? Well, first, Vice President Harris, in addition to needing to stop lying about her policy record,

needs to stop lying about Project 2025. The motivation of Project 2025, as it always has been since 1980 when it was named mandate for leadership, is to provide policies and personnel to the next president, should he or she so choose to use them, that will allow us to restore the American dream. She has mischaracterized Project 2025 so badly that we've gotten more than 50 fact checks, most of them from left of center media outlets correcting the record. But ultimately, if President Trump and Mr. Vance prevail this fall, we anticipate. We don't presume, we don't expect, that's not how we operate here at Heritage. We anticipate that great ideas and great people rise to the top. And just like a menu at a really busy restaurant, Project 2025 is a menu of

every possible conservative policy solution, a think tanker would ever dream of. So you would never implement that in a single term. But we know that the policies and the people speak for themselves and we're very optimistic about it. Final question. This is the most compressed election run will probably ever see from a presidential candidate. We have just over two months until the actual election early voting in a matter of days. Do you believe the American people will get a chance to see Harris's policies clearly articulated either by herself or by the Trump campaign and conservatives before they vote? I do, but it will be just in the nick of time.

I mean, this is something that I believe has been orchestrated over the last couple of years by the powers that be among the progressive Democrats. In fact, I've been saying publicly for a year that Joe Biden would not be the Democrat nominee for reasons that are now obvious to us. And the vice president, of course, has benefited from probably the most ridiculous honeymoon period, artificially created by many members of the media, but it's beginning to come to an end. And you know why? Because the policy record is so bad, because every time we go to the grocery store, every time we put gas in our tanks, every time we get our electric bill, we realize

some policymaker in Washington, D.C. is responsible for this nonsense. They're responsible for undermining the American dream. And her name is Vice President Kamala Harris. Well, the final sprint has begun. Kevin, thank you so much for talking with us. That was Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, and this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.