Kamala Harris did not serve a full term in the Senate before becoming her party’s nominee for vice president. Elected in 2016, she was assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee in January 2018 after Al Franken’s resignation and Doug Jones’ special election victory. That short window was enough for her to display her true colors as a radical ideologue and a demagogue, rather than a serious member of the upper chamber.
Mere seconds into the start of Brett Kavanaugh’s hearings in 2018, Harris interrupted the chairman, Chuck Grassley, ultimately launching a torrent of interruptions, not only by screeching protestors, but also by Democratic senators. When committee members were finally able to ask their questions, Harris began her turn with a set of bizarre “gotcha” questions as to whether Kavanaugh had ever discussed Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign with anyone from the law firm Kasowitz Benson Torres, which she hardly let him answer. It was a transparent effort to set a perjury trap for the nominee, executed ineptly enough to leave both viewers and the nominee perplexed as to precisely what she was talking about.
Predictably, she later fanned the flames of the defamatory allegations of sexual abuse made against Kavanaugh without corroboration, tweeting that the allegations were “credible,” then pushing the nominee during his hearings to ask the White House to authorize an FBI investigation. And a year later, she shamelessly doubled down and called for Kavanaugh to be impeached.
Of course, none of this was included in the vignette run during this year’s Democratic National Convention laughably casting Harris as a “truth-teller” in her Senate inquisitions.
Not long after, during the confirmation hearing of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Harris asked whether the nominee believed “that climate change is happening and it’s threatening the air we breathe and the water we drink?” Leave it to Senator Harris, future Democratic presidential nominee, to conflate policy issues and legal questions, wasting everyone’s time, in an attempt to create news headlines, instead of taking the process seriously and learning more about how the nominee views the law.
Yet it was during lower-court nominations that Harris went above and beyond the standard measure of liberal demagoguery. In written questions, she grilled several nominees about their membership in the Knights of Columbus, the well-known Catholic fraternal organization whose main focus is charity work, on account of the group’s Catholic values.
Here is a small sampling of the absurd written questions she submitted to three nominees who belonged to the Knights: Peter Phipps (United States District Court For the Western District of Pennsylvania ), Paul Matey (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit), and Brian Buescher (United States District Court for the District of Nebraska):
- If confirmed to the bench, will you defend the right to life of every human being, from the moment of conception to natural death? (for Phipps)
- Must you swear an oath in order to join this organization? If so, what is that oath? (for Phipps)
- When your group’s organizational values conflict with litigants’ constitutional rights, how can litigants in your court expect a fair hearing? (for Phipps)
- Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization? (for Matey and Buescher)
- Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed marriage equality when you joined the organization? (for Matey and Buescher)
- Do you believe that a fetus is entitled to any protection under the U.S. Constitution? (for Matey)
- Do you believe the right to marry carries an implicit guarantee that everyone should be able to exercise that right equally? (for Matey and Buescher)
All these questions, of course, hint at her own policy preferences—no-limits abortion on demand through birth, supported by taxpayer money, prominent among them. They also highlight the fact that Democrats cannot fathom anyone having the ability to, as Phipps put it, “follow the law and not any personal views that I may have.”
The Knights of Columbus was not the only large religious charity Harris singled out. Eighth Circuit nominee Jonathan Kobes’ membership on the board of Bethany Christian Services, a nonprofit dedicated to helping vulnerable children and families, triggered additional irrelevant questions. Of the group’s practice not to certify same-sex couples for foster care, she grilled Kobes on his awareness and opinion of Bethany’s policy and whether he had advised, advocated, or assisted Bethany on its policy.
On another front, Kobes had made fairly obvious observations in an interview about changing “religious participation levels in the cities as opposed to the smaller towns” and “traditional conservative ideas on the family” that “have gone out” over a short time, as reflected in the chronology of President Obama’s changing position on same-sex marriage. This prompted Harris to ask yet another nominee: “Do you believe that judges may consider their personal religious views when evaluating cases before the court?”
This pattern of questioning shows Harris to be a rigid ideologue confused about the role of the courts. The above nominees are just a sampling of that confusion. (Other examples include her written questions for Sixth Circuit nominee Eric Murphy, Fourth Circuit nominee Allison Jones Rushing, and district court nominee Jason Pulliam.)
As a senator, Kamala Harris was more concerned with creating viral clips than genuinely assessing the legal competence of judicial nominees. She did not take her duties seriously, and her conduct fed into the anti-Catholic and anti-evangelical sentiment that has sadly been trending upwards in our country.
Her demagoguery was and is not excusable for any level of elected office, and her inability to set aside a political agenda to do her duty should be cause for concern.