On the menu today: Thanks to Bret Baier and the gang at Fox News’ Special Report for having me on the panel last night. The topics of last night’s show flow into today’s newsletter agenda: Kamala Harris’s declaration that if she’s elected president, she will urge Senate Democrats to eliminate the filibuster to pass a federal law ensuring nationwide access to abortion; her backwards proposal on the housing supply; and the possibility of her making a campaign stop near the Mexican border in Arizona.
The Filibuster Hope That Never Dies
Vice President Kamala Harris in an NPR interview that aired Tuesday morning:
I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe. And get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.
With Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema leaving the Senate, were Harris to be elected and push to eliminate the filibuster to codify late-stage abortion on demand nationally, it’s hard to see who among Democrats would be standing in the way. . . . Were Harris to eliminate the filibuster for Roe it would also make it much easier for Democrats to pass a far-left-wing agenda on areas outside of abortion — tax hikes, socialized health insurance, gun bans, price controls, etc.
Once Democrats have eliminated the filibuster for one piece of legislation, it’s hard to see why progressive activist groups would accept keeping it in place for anything else. Left-wing organizations aren’t really known for their patience, respect for precedent and established procedure, and serene acceptance of legislative obstacles. Can you envision Senate Democrats telling them, “We got rid of the filibuster for what NARAL wanted, but we’re keeping it in place for the bills desired by Black Lives Matter, Human Rights Campaign, the Sierra Club, or anybody with the last name Soros”?
As discussed yesterday, unless something truly shocking happens in one of the Senate races — Democrat Glenn Elliott beating sitting governor Jim Justice in West Virginia, or Democrats winning an open-seat Senate race in a place like Utah or Indiana — the best-case scenario for the Democrats is a 50–50 Senate where Vice President Tim Walz breaks the ties.
All it takes on paper to eliminate the filibuster is a majority vote. The scenario that Harris envisions is Walz breaking the tie to eliminate the filibuster, 51 votes to 50. The usual description of the filibuster is “a simple procedural mechanism that allows the minority party to block legislation from advancing in the Senate.” In this case, the Republicans would be a “minority” of 50 seats. It would represent one of the most shameless power grabs in the chamber’s history.
But if there are 51 Republican senators starting in January, all of this is moot.
Also note that hours after this newsletter spotlighted the statement of Michigan Democratic senator Gary Peters, chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, that “the party is not yet committed to devoting financial resources to Texas or Florida,” Peters told Axios that Texas and Florida “are real and we hope to get resources into those states.”
He hopes.
Now, as mentioned yesterday, Texas is an extremely expensive state to run a senate campaign in, because it’s big and has 20 media markets, and big cities have more expensive ad rates.
The same dynamic is at work in Florida: ten media markets, with Tampa, Orlando, and Miami all ranking in the top 18, and West Palm Beach and Jacksonville in the top 41. It takes a lot of money to move the numbers in the Sunshine State or the Lone Star State. Is Peters willing to dump a couple million in there, and not spend that money in Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc.?
Oh, and notice Peters didn’t say anything to Axios about “independent” Dan Osborn — who, again, says he “loves Bernie” Sanders — and the notion that he’s on the verge of knocking off incumbent Republican senator Deb Fischer in Nebraska.
Harris: We Will Lower Housing Prices by Creating More Buyers and Increasing Demand
Also in that NPR interview with Harris:
Well, first of all, let me just say that part of the housing issue across our country is that we just don’t have enough supply. And so part of my plan is what we need to do to increase supply and help people get their foot in the door, which includes the $25,000 down payment assistance.
No. Buyers are demand, not supply. If you give lots of people $25,000 to help with a down payment, you are increasing the demand for housing, not the supply. This will increase prices, not lower them. This policy change will have the opposite effect of the one Harris intends.
Take a guess at Harris’s next part of her answer. Really, just take a guess.
Are you ready?
But let me just back up for a moment. Look, I grew up a middle-class kid. My mother worked long days, she worked weekends, and she was able to save up so that by the time I was a teenager, she was able to buy our first house.
So, I understand and have as part of my lived experience a lifetime, practically, of being a renter and also what it means for families to aspire to own a home. But it’s hard. It takes a lot of time and that was many, many years ago and the American dream of home ownership has become even more elusive.
This is a tic of Harris in her rare interviews; she gets asked some version of “what are you going to do?” and she answers with a version of the Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” answer.
Harris went on to elaborate that part of her plan is “to work with the private sector and homebuilders to create incentives for them to build three million new homes by the end of my first term.” That would, at least in theory, increase supply. But the private sector and homebuilders already have “incentives” to build new homes: all the money that buyers will pay in order to own a new home.
As Taco Bell Used to Say, ‘Make a Run for the Border’
Harris is planning to visit the southern border during her visit to Arizona on Friday, ABC News reports.
Harris should go to the border. She can’t hide from it. The issue of illegal immigration and our porous southern border with Mexico is not going to go away between now and Election Day. She’s got an indefensible record as the “migration” czar, but if she attempts to avoid talking about the issue for the remainder of the campaign, it will confirm what her critics contend — she has no plan, she’s still the same woman who chanted, “down, down with deportation” in a parade back in 2018, and she isn’t really that interested in enforcing immigration laws. By avoiding the issue, Harris will send a signal that she just wants the whole topic to go away. A vote for her is a vote for the status quo on illegal immigration and the border.
If Harris goes to the border and talks about what she wants to do differently than Biden, she at least has a shot at mitigating her weakness on this issue.
Harris’s ads crow that as “a border-state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border.”
Harris’s contention is that her experience from earlier in her career will make her effective in securing the border and limiting illegal immigration when she’s president. But if all of that experience was so useful, why did everything at the border get worse during the Biden years, when she was the “migration” czar?
While the ad portrays Harris as a “border state prosecutor,” her role as California’s Attorney General from 2011 to 2017 primarily involved state-level criminal justice matters. The ad’s implication that she was directly involved in border cartel cases appears to stretch the truth.
Claims about Harris jailing gang members for cross-border smuggling also seem inflated. While she did prosecute gang members, these cases mostly involved local drug offenses rather than international smuggling operations.
A fair-minded assessment of Harris’s time as state attorney general should acknowledge that she faced challenges and setbacks beyond her control. Shortly after she was sworn in, Governor Jerry Brown and the overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature cut the state Division of Law Enforcement’s budget by $72 million. She warned at the time that the cuts would “cripple California’s statewide anti-gang and drug trafficking operations.” The operations may not have been “crippled,” but state law enforcement was forced to make do with less:
As part of the belt-tightening, the DOJ’s Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement closed the following year, with parts of it being absorbed into another program.
“When that was shut down, we lost a lot of the capacity we had to level major transnational organized crime groups throughout the state of California, and they have never recovered from that,” said Mike Sena, executive director of the Northern California High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, who previously worked at the state DOJ.
Harris indisputably prioritized the prosecution of members of transnational gangs; but it’s tough to say that she gained a lot of traction against them. By 2014, three years into her time as state AG, she and her staff issued a grim warning:
As an international hub, more narcotics, weapons and humans are trafficked in and out of California than any other state. The size and strength of California’s economy make our businesses, financial institutions and communities lucrative targets for transnational criminal activity. . . .
In 2012 alone, 305 drug-related transnational criminal organizations were found operating in the state, including Mexico-based drug cartels in at least 22 cities from Northern California to the southern border. . . . California has also witnessed an increase in recent years in the availability of wholesale methamphetamine, particularly its most potent form, “ice,” with the Sinaloa cartel driving supply. California is now the primary source for methamphetamine nationwide with as much as 70 percent of the U.S. foreign supply of methamphetamine being trafficked through the San Diego point of entry alone.
Harris wanted the California state legislature to pass two bills to help the state’s fight against transnational criminal organizations. One would have added money laundering to the list of offenses for which law enforcement could wiretap suspects, and the other would have allowed the state to freeze criminal proceeds prior to an indictment being filed. ACLU opposition torpedoed both bills.
Now, while Harris was state attorney general, you can find cases of state prosecutors successfully winning convictions for human trafficking and mass arrests of transnational gang members, and Harris’s office prosecuted sex-trafficking cases. No doubt, she and her office prosecuted those crimes when the opportunities were there.
Perhaps the better measure of Harris’s success is the level of human trafficking in the state when she took over as state attorney general in 2011 compared to the level when she departed to serve as a senator in January 2017.
The first year that the National Human Trafficking Hotline collected statistics and broke them down by state was 2015, with 4,251 “signals to the hotline” from California. (From 2007 to 2014, the Hotline received 11,431 signals from California.) In 2016, NHTH reported 4,658 “signals to the hotline” from California. Harris left office in January 2017; that year, NHTH reported 4,742 “signals to the hotline” from California.
NBC News, February 2017: “California bore the lion’s share with over 1,300 incidences of human trafficking last year, almost double any other state, the nonprofit reported.” In other words, while Harris may have prioritized the issue in the state attorney general’s office, there’s little sign that the state’s efforts put much of a dent in the thriving human-trafficking trade.
Harris didn’t have perfect control of the entire state government, and let us remember who was running the federal government during that time. The Obama administration said it prioritized the issue, but some members of Congress had doubts about how far that commitment went when it conflicted with other priorities. (See here, here, and here.)
From 2011 to 2015, California attorney general Harris played whack-a-mole with pervasive human-trafficking operations in that state. She insists she’ll do a much better job as president.
ADDENDA: Charlie Cooke and I are scheduled to join Megyn Kelly on her program today.
I am a full supporter of the newly announced National Review “Rich Lowry Cancellation Tour,” but I note that statement sounds like I support the cancellation of Rich Lowry. More details in the link.