Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday unveiled a slate of policy proposals on her campaign website, including plans to “restore and protect reproductive freedoms” and to call for a federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries.
Less than two weeks ago, NR noted the lack of an issues or policy section on the Harris-Walz campaign website as an indication that the campaign was running behind. By late August in the 2008 campaign, Obama had released a 33-page “Blueprint for Change” outlining his plan for America. His campaign website featured policy proposals on 23 different topics, including the economy, education, health care, and homeland security. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign website was chock full of proposals, with nearly 40 policy blurbs explaining her positions on the issues.
Now, in a newly published “issues” section of the website, Harris offers proposals for a “new way forward” under several categories, which include efforts to “build an opportunity economy and lower costs for families, “safeguard our fundamental freedoms,” “ensure safety and justice for all,” and to “keep America safe, secure, and prosperous.”
The section’s publishing comes just one day before Harris is set to debate former president Donald Trump in the first general election presidential debate.
Among the new policy proposals is a doubling-down of her much-criticized price-control plan.
“She will go after bad actors who exploit an emergency to rip off consumers by calling for the first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries, which will build on the anti-price gouging statutes already in place in 37 states,” the page explains.
Economist have said the proposal misidentifies the underlying causes of inflation and papers over the reality that the profit margin for grocery stores remains in the single digits.
Harris also highlights work she has done as vice president, including her controversial efforts to boost minority business that has lead to a “tripling the Small Business Administration’s lending to Black-owned businesses, and more than doubling small-dollar lending to Latino and women-owned businesses.”
The policy blurbs on the campaign website represent Harris’s first foray into policy outside of her economic plan that she unveiled last month.
Joshua Hendrickson, an associate professor of economics at the University of Mississippi, previously told NR that Harris’s campaign is “so short on details” and “so short on policy proposals” that it’s “not even clear what their overall vision is.” And in cases were she had taken a position, she had done so haphazardly, “throwing policies at the wall” without any “coherent pattern,” he said.
Harris mentions a plan to “secure our borders and fix our broken immigration system,” saying she believes in “tough, smart solutions” to reform the immigration system.
“As President, she will bring back the bipartisan border security bill and sign it into law. At the same time, she knows that our immigration system is broken and needs comprehensive reform that includes strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship,” the site says.
Meanwhile, each section of Harris’s policy rollout includes a paragraph about Trump’s “Project 2025” agenda – though Trump has strongly disavowed the policy blueprint, which comes from the conservative Heritage Foundation and not the campaign itself.
“If elected president, Trump will implement his Project 2025 agenda to consolidate power, bring the Department of Justice and the FBI under his direct control so he can give himself unchecked legal power and go after his opponents, and rule as a dictator on ‘day one,'” the Harris-Walz website falsely claims.
“Project 2025 would give him unprecedented control to implement his destructive agenda, including another handout to his billionaire friends and giant corporations,” it adds.
The campaign also claims Trump will “ban abortion nationwide, restrict access to birth control, force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions, and jeopardize access to IVF.”
This despite the GOP platform expressing the opposite: “We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments),” the platform reads.